The Daily Snowman

The Beatles in 3126

2011-02-16T10:33:00.000-05:00

A while back, we had some fun here examining the limits of pop culture in a post titled The Limits of Pop Culture. The impetus for that post was an anecdote concerning high school seniors (people born, roughly, in the early 1990s) who did not recognize the source of the words "Baby you can drive my car." If it took only 45 years for the Beatles to be somewhat forgotten, we wondered, what would happen in 1045 years?

Thanks to this impressive find, we no longer have to wonder.

[via Kottke]

Paragraph of the Week

2011-02-13T12:37:00.000-05:00

From Roger Ebert's blog post, Goodbye to All That:

I realize so clearly now that conversations are all about the flow, the timing, the music. Now that IBM's Big Blue has beaten a grandmaster at chess and promises to win at Jeopardy, I have a challenge that will grind it to a halt: I challenge Big Blue to tell a joke in a voice that has the tone and the timing, the words and the music, just right.

A Review of Sequitur: David Foster Wallace

2011-02-11T11:39:00.001-05:00

The only thing I knew about Sequitur: David Foster Wallace before actually attending the performance of it last night at New York's Symphony Space was that it was some type of musical interpretation of some of the writings of David Foster Wallace. So here, in brief, is what this performance was: the reading of two short stories written by DFW accompanied by live music and, in one case, a complementary visual component.

First up was Everything is Green, based on the short story of the same name that is collected in Girl with Curious Hair. This performance was fairly straightforward, featuring a recorded reading of, to the best of my knowledge, the complete text of the story supplemented by the piano and what I'm pretty sure was a flute. The program guide states that the composer of the piece, Randall Woolf, was fascinated by the "outsider English" in which the story is written and that the music was meant to complement this argot.

By far the longer and more interesting portion of the evening was the night's second performance, Tri-Stan, based on the short story Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko, collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Mary Nessinger was the highlight of this show, as she brilliantly sang selections from the source text, nicely matching her performance to the tone of the written word, cleverly coalescing instances of heightened drama with winking asides to the audience. The music had a fuller sound, as a full ten musicians huddled on the crowded stage along with Nessinger and the conductor, Paul Hostetter. A nice sized screen positioned above the performers' heads was used to project a range of images, from the text being read by Nessinger to publicity shots of the various real-life sitcoms mentioned in the story and, even, shadowed images of gyrating co-eds during certain relevant points.

I'll be honest: I'm fretfully unfit to judge the musical merits of each piece. My ear isn't refined enough to fairly do that. I much preferred the second presentation, though, precisely because of its non-strictly musical elements. For one, the difference between a live and a recorded reading of the source texts is just huge. The projected images helped me follow the action, as it was simply hard to hear, at times, the readings above the musical accompaniment. But, most important, Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko--a mythical retelling of the tragedy of TV executive working before and during the rise of cable--is perfectly suited for this type of musical performance. Where the music distracted at times from Everything is Green, Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko, in all its mock-epic glory, was enhanced by the live reading and the images and the music.

All in all, these are two creative interpretations of two perhaps lesser-known DFW stories. I feel that I better appreciate the stories after seeing them performed, which, for me, was much the point of the evening. Also, I learned that, apparently, I'll attend anything that has the name David Foster Wallace in the title.

McBain's Action Movie

2011-02-03T11:21:00.000-05:00

Making the internet rounds this morning is a video some have called an Easter Egg from the early years of The Simpsons. Remember McBain, the Schwarzenegger caricature? Some have claimed that the short snippets of his movies depicted in the show--watched by various members of the Simpson family--are all part of a larger McBain action movie in which the hero hunts down a corrupt senator and avenges his partner's death.

Problem is, these scenes aren't portrayed in chronological order. For example, the closing scene of this purported action movie below is actually from McBain's second-ever appearance, in the season 2 episode "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" This changes this compilation from an extremely clever hidden in-joke told by multiple generations of The Simpsons writers to just a slick editing job by the fine folks at College Humor.

Video is still worth watching, though.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Bob and his Burgers

2011-01-31T18:50:00.000-05:00

I don't quite understand TV's insistence on saving all new episodes of virtually all new shows for certain months of the year. If even a few new episodes of decent shows were broadcast in, say, July or December, there's a good chance I would watch them instead of what I usually watch during television's calendric dead spots, namely, old episodes of The Simpsons (seasons 1-9 only). The last week of January, though, is a good time for TV watching. Just about everything is new.

The last two weeks have witnessed the airing of at least one new episode of, by my count, seven shows that I like watching, ranging from loyalty projects (The Simpsons, now in season 22) to programs that I find legitimately entertaining and funny (Parks and Rec). But the program I have most looked forward to watching over this time is Bob's Burgers, which the great Alan Sepinwall has called "a demented, funny little show."

The writing is good and funny, but the show shines most brightly because of its cast. H. Jon Benjamin has maybe the best voice in the world, one that is somehow perfectly suited for roles as diverse as a spy and a sad-sack burger joint owner. Best of all, though, is Kristen Schaal. I've had a crush on her for a while now, but I've laughed more at her Louise, a precocious middle-schooler who always wears a pink rabbit hat, in three episodes than I did at FotC's Mel in two seasons. Mostly because she's allowed to yell a lot. (Schaal is a hilarious yeller.) The Louise character lies with no regard for who may be harmed by her tall tales and is savvy enough to realize that Foot Feta-ish is a better name for a cheese-topped burger than Never Been Feta. And yet she's also a kid who sometimes just likes to draw with crayons. The balance is something fun to watch.

The aired episodes are available on Hulu, but I'm also embedding here a 12-minute interview (NSFW language) with Schaal, Eugene Mirman, and John Roberts in which the three cast members ignore completely the poor interviewer's questions. This might be why the show is so much fun: these people may actually be crazy.

Tom Waits Meets New York

2011-01-24T17:12:00.000-05:00

Tom Waits - Potter's Field from Phil Bebbington on Vimeo.

Cool juxtaposition.

[via Roger Ebert]

The NFL's Relationship with Rules

2011-01-10T12:20:00.001-05:00

NFL rules dictate that overtime games will be decided by way of the sudden death system. This means that the first team to score wins the game. Whether by touchdown, field goal or safety--how cool would it be for an overtime game to end via safety?--the game automatically ends when the first points are scored. This system has raised serious questions of fairness from a host of critics. And these critics have a point. According to research done by Advanced NFL Stats, from 2000 to 2007, the team to win the overtime coin toss has won the game 60% of the time. Games are designed to measure talent, some combination of skill and effort. The better team should win most of the time. Why should a simple coin toss--the very definition of randomness--determine to such an extent the winner of a football game?

With these questions in mind, the NFL has decided to change the overtime rules for the playoffs. Thanks to Jason Kirk of SB Nation Atlanta for this quick summary of the changes:

The rules are designed to prevent the team winning the coin flip from getting a couple decent plays and kicking a field goal without the other team having a chance at the ball. The new rules:
Each team gets to receive a kickoff at least once, unless the team receiving the ball first gets a touchdown on its first drive. A touchdown ends it.
If the team that gets ball first scores a field goal, the other team gets to receive a kickoff. A touchdown on that drive ends it.
Once each team has received one kickoff, the next score wins, whether it's a field goal, touchdown, or what have you.
If the game is tied after 15 minutes, another period will begin, with the next score ending the game.

We're now one weekend--four games of varying excitement levels--into the 2011 NFL Playoffs. There has not, as of yet, been a game that required extra time to decide a winner. This in itself is not surprising: over the last five years, only six out of the fifty-five playoff contents went to overtime. Consequences are magnified in the playoffs, though. The staging of even one overtime playoff game a year means that the standard sixty minutes of football proved insufficient to determine a winner between two really good teams. A slight change in the basic rules of play may have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of an entire season. In 2007, the Chicago Bears defeated the Seahawks in overtime. The Bears progressed all the way to the Super Bowl. The next year, The New York Giants prevailed over the Packers in the NFC Championship Game. Thanks in part to the stickiest helmet in the world, the Giants won the Super Bowl. And last year, the New Orleans Saints needed overtime to defeat the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game before going on to defeat the Colts in the Super Bowl. Besides for the obvious lesson--Brett Favre sure does throw a bunch of interceptions in NFC Championship Games--it's important to realize that overtime has determined a Super Bowl participant in three out of the last four years.

I'm not saying that the playoff overtime rule is fairer than the regular season rule. I think there are issues with both systems. I just find it fascinating that the NFL would innovate in the very rules and strategy of the game but would limit such innovation to the playoffs. If the playoff rule is better, why not use this system for the regular season? If the regular-season rule is better, why bother changing it for the playoffs? Moreover, why would the NFL institute this change without testing it? (For a good example of a sport testing out its rules, see the NHL.)

Yahoo's Chris Chase describes the problem nicely, focusing on the potential benefits of the team that wins the toss deciding to kick off in order to know at the start of the possession which type of score is needed:

How would a team even know whether deferring is a good idea? It's not like any coach has ever been in a game situation involving these rules. Like or hate the new overtime rules, the fact that they're getting its trial run during the playoffs is insane. Whenever the rule comes into play, it will be the first time any NFL coach has ever dealt with it. What better time to test something out than in the biggest stage in the sport? Roger Goodell thinks ending a Super Bowl with a field goal on the first possession is bad? How about ending a Super Bowl with a new rule that nobody in football has ever had to deal with before?

Let's take a step back and think about this for a minute: A new format that fundamentally changes the game is being instituted before the playoffs without any testing. Only the NFL could get away with that. Can you imagine if Bud Selig tried to do this in baseball. Maybe before the playoffs he issued a decree that a team has to win by two runs in extra innings. He'd be mocked in every sports column and on every sports station in America. The NFL does it and nobody bats an eyelid. Flippantly changing a rule that's been in use for 40 years and giving it no trial period? Sure, why not!

I think the comparison to baseball is a helpful one. Chase is correct in anticipating the outrage a similar rule change in baseball would elicit. But more interesting are the two sports' relationships with rules and officiating in general. Baseball's rules are very clear. The runner is safe if he touches the base before the baseball touches him. The ball is foul if it lands on this side of a white line and its fair if it lands on the other side (or, on the line itself). Baseball officiating is, consequently, very clear as well. The umpire's job is to determine the facts of the play. Umpires are positioned around the field of play in order to observe as best they can what happened.

Compare this to football. Football referees are tasked with both observing the events on the field and interpreting the meaning of these events. Here, for example, is the key line in the NFL's pass interference guideline:

It is pass interference by either team when any player movement beyond the line of scrimmage significantly hinders the progress of an eligible player of such player’s opportunity to catch the ball.

What does it mean to significantly hinder the progress of a football player? Further complicating matters is the stipulation that the rule only applies when there is "[c]ontact by a defender who is not playing the ball and such contact restricts the receiver’s opportunity to make the catch." How can a referee know with any degree of certainty when the defender is playing the ball or not playing the ball? And, of course, there's the old discussion on what constitutes a football move.

It is the need for such interpretation that inspired Richard Deitsch, Sports Illustrated's wonderful sports media analyst, to name Mike Pereira the Sports Media Person of the Year. Pereira is the former NFL Vice President of Officiating who now works for FOX, offering commentary on the officials. Here's Deitsch explaining his pick:

Revolutions in sports television sometimes come with little fanfare. Fox initially thought Pereira, the former vice president of officiating for the NFL, would make his biggest impact on the web. But the opening week of the NFL season featured one of the more controversial plays of the year -- Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson's apparent game-winning catch against the Bears, and Pereira's insight on the play proved invaluable. "Most people thought it was a touchdown but when they came out of replay, I predicted they would leave it as an incomplete pass and they did," said Pereira, who works out of Fox's NFL studios in Los Angeles. "That play generated more talk than I could have imagined and I think Fox recognized the value of addressing this immediately on television."

Viewers have longed for broadcasters to provide accurate explanations from the NFL's byzantine rule book, and Pereira, thankfully, has taken the burden off ex-jocks and announcers, who can come off as befuddled as fans. He has correctly predicted the outcome of 49 of 50 replay challenges this season (he disagreed with the judgment of the refs on a Jeremy Maclin reception that was ruled a catch and fumble; Pereira predicted the refs would overturn a play to an incomplete pass), but more importantly, he has imbued viewers with added knowledge.

Can you imagine such a prominent role for a former umpire on FOX's baseball telecast? What would he even say?

Rules changes are nothing new in the NFL. After all, the NFL has changed its sport more than any other governing body. There has never been a rule change more drastic or influential than the NFL's decision to allow the forward pass. For the NFL, changing a major rule just in time for the playoffs is just par for the course.

Paragraph of the Week

2011-01-10T09:37:00.000-05:00

From David Segal's article, "Is Law School a Losing Game?," published in the January 8, 2011 edition of The New York Times:

It is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it.

They are also cash cows.

David Simon should probably write a TV series about the stat juking going on here.

Video Essay of the Week

2011-01-02T20:34:00.002-05:00

Matt Zoller Seitz reviewed the ten best movie scenes of the year for Salon. Here is his take on a particularly great scene from Toy Story 3. (Note: Please don't watch this if you haven't seen the movie yet.)

Also great is his take on the rowing scene in The Social Network.

My Year in Media and Cities, 2010

2010-12-30T11:13:00.000-05:00

Still inspired by Jason over at Kottke.org, I'm continuing my practice of cataloging some of the things I've done and the places I've been over the past year. You can find 2008's and 2009's lists by clicking on the numbers.

Here we go with 2010.

Cities I've attended, spending at least a day and a night in each locale
Alon Shvut, Israel
Jerusalem, Israel
Manhattan, New York
West Orange, New Jersey
Teaneck, New Jersey
Lake George, New York
Edison, New Jersey
Woodmere, New York
Honesdale, Pennsylvania
Spring Lake, New Jersey
Brooklyn, New York
Kiryat Arba, Israel
Hewlett, New York

Movies I've seen on the big screen
Sherlock Holmes
Crazy Heart
Hot Tub Time Machine
How to Train Your Dragon
Death at a Funeral
Iron Man 2
Shrek Forever After
Toy Story 3
Annie Hall
Inception
Despicable Me
The Social Network
The Town
Jackass 3D
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1
Tron: Legacy
The Iron Giant
True Grit

Movies I've seen on the little screen
Young @ Heart
The Botany of Desire
Adaptation
Inglourious Basterds
Best in Show
Do the Right Thing
Winning Time
Big Fan
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
June 17, 1994
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
Futurama: Bender’s Game
Cyrus
X-Men
Pulp Fiction
Fargo
Get Smart
Futurama: Bender’s Big Score
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs
Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder
Zombieland
Little Shop of Horrors

Books I've read
How Fiction Works
Eating the Dinosaur
Anathem
Killing Yourself to Live
The Mystery Guest
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
The Art of a Beautiful Game
Persepolis
2666
Here is New York
Although of course you end up becoming yourself
A Sense of Where You Are
Cardboard Gods
Blankets
Netherland
Baseball Prospectus 2010
Loose Balls
Best American Non-Required Reading 2009
Baseball Between the Numbers
Into the Wild
Kafka on the Shore
The Book of Basketball
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
My Losing Season
Levels of the Game
The Human Stain
Freedom
FreeDarko’s The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History
Cooking for Geeks
The Case of the Gilded Fly
Missing

TV I've watched
The Simpsons
Seasons 6-8, 13

Mad Men
Season 4

Party Down
Seasons 1-2

Futurama
Seasons 1-4

Archer
Season 1

The Wire
Season 1

The Walking Dead
Season 1

Louie
Season 1

Each new episode of:
The Simpsons
Futurama
30 Rock
Parks and Rec
Community
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Modern Family

Sporting events I've attended
Monday, January 18
New York Knicks 99, Detroit Pistons 91
Madison Square Garden

Tuesday, February 9
Sacramento Kings 118, New York Knicks 114 (OT)
Madison Square Garden

Saturday, February 20
Oklahoma City Thunder 121, New York Knicks 118 (OT)
Madison Square Garden

Wednesday, March 3
New York Knicks 128, Detroit Pistons 104
Madison Square Garden

Monday, April 12
New York Knicks 114, Washington Wizards 103
Madison Square Garden

Wednesday, May 5
New York Yankees 7, Baltimore Orioles 5
Yankee Stadium

Monday, August 9
Boston Red Sox 2, New York Yankees 1
Yankee Stadium

Tuesday, August 10
New York Mets 1, Colorado Rockies 0
Citi Field

Tuesday, August 17
New York Yankees 6, Detroit Tigers 2
Yankee Stadium

Tuesday, September 7
Fernando Verdasco defeats David Ferrer
Louis Armstrong Stadium
US Open

Saturday, October 9
New York Yankees 6, Minnesota Twins 1
Yankee Stadium

Monday, October 18
Texas Rangers 8, New York Yankees 0
Yankee Stadium

Tuesday, November 23
New York Knicks 110, Charlotte Bobcats 107
Madison Square Garden

Wednesday, December 15
Boston Celtics 118, New York Knicks 116
Madison Square Garden

Plays I've attended
Tuesday, February 23
Rock of Ages
Brooks Atkinson Theater

Sunday, March 7
The Tempest
BAM’s Harvey Theater

Wednesday, June 23
The 39 Steps
New World Stages

Saturday, July 31
Twelfth Night
Divine Park, Spring Lake, New Jersey

Music concerts I've attended
Steve Earle with Allison Moore and Greg Trooper
City Winery

Saturday, November 13
The Baltimore Symphony
Carnegie Hall

So, on average, I've:

visited a new place every ~28 days;
seen a movie on the big screen every ~20 days;
seen a movie on the little screen every ~16 days;
read a book every ~12 days;
attended a live sporting event every ~26 days;
watched a season of TV every ~24 days (not including all the partial seasons);
attended a play once every three months;
attended a concert once every six months;
and composed a blog post (including this one) once every ~3.5 days.

It's been a busy year.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-12-26T11:33:00.000-05:00

James L. Brooks, interviewed in the January 2011 edition of Esquire:

I had an argument years and years ago with another comedy writer. Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman were biggest guns at the time--long may they wave--and we had ad argument about which one was number one. I took Jack, and I finally won the argument by saying he could play either role in The Odd Couple.

Christmas For The Jews

2010-12-24T14:11:00.000-05:00

I'll probably post this every year that the internet exists.

An Important Announcement Regarding Beans

2010-12-23T00:29:00.000-05:00

The recipe for white bean and garlic soup in Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks calls for soaking the white beans for several hours before bringing them a boil and simmering for fifteen minutes. The recipe is great and--as it turns out--informative. Mr. Potter notes:

Don't skip soaking and boiling the beans. Really. One type of protein present in beans--phytohaemagglutinin--causes extreme intestinal distress. The beans to be boiled to denature this protein; cooking them in a slow cooker or sous vide setup will not denature this protein and actually make things worse. If you're in a rush, use canned white beans; they'll already been cooked.

You can read more about phytohaemagglutinin here. So please, folks, soak and boil your beans.

A Portrait of the Artest as a Young Man

2010-12-21T11:02:00.000-05:00

A small art gallery in Toronto recently devoted a night to Ron Artest. The results were fantastic. Here's a slideshow of the works on display.

The Basketball Jones, an NBA podcast and blog, sent an intrepid reporter to check out the scene. Stick around for the end: Artest shows up.

TBJ: Ron Artest crashes Ron Artest exhibit from The Basketball Jones on Vimeo.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-12-19T10:42:00.001-05:00

From Nick Paumgarten's "Master of Play," a profile of Nintendo genius and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, in the December 20, 2010 issue of The New Yorker:

Miyamoto recognizes that there is pleasure in difficulty but also in ease, in mastery, in performing a familiar act with aplomb, whether that be catching a baseball, dancing a tango, doing Sudoku, or steering Mario through the Mushroom Kingdom, jumping on Goombas and Koopa Troopas. His games strike this magical balance between the excitement that comes from facing new problems and the swagger from facing down old ones. The consequent sensation of confidence is useful, in dealing with a game’s more challenging stages, but also a worthy aim in itself. “A lot of the so-called ‘action games’ are not made that way,” Miyamoto told me. “All the time, players are forced to do their utmost. If they are challenged to the limit, is it really fun for them?” In his own games, Miyamoto said, “You are constantly providing the players with a new challenge, but at the same time providing them with some stages or some occasions where they can simply, repeatedly, do something again and again. And that itself can be a joy.”

Hand Models: Creepy or Creepiest?

2010-12-14T10:33:00.000-05:00

Ran across this interview with Ellen Sirot, hand model. Haven't been able to get these three minutes of weird goodness out of my head since.

Jason Kottke hit the nail on the head: "Sirot is constantly performing with her hands but it's also like she hasn't got any hands, not functional ones anyway."

Zoolander wasn't that far off...

Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com

Paragraph of the Week

2010-12-12T21:19:00.000-05:00

From Kathleen Fitzpatrick's "Infinite Summer: Reading in the Social Network," via Howling Fantods:

What made Wallace’s work so phenomenally powerful for so many readers, I would argue, has to do with its ability to connect three consistent impulses in contemporary fiction in a way that no other writer has managed quite so well. In Wallace’s work, we repeatedly see wed high-modern/postmodern experimental pyrotechnics not only with an incisive cultural critique but also with a deeply personal concern for quotidian human suffering. That is to say that Wallace’s fiction combines rich investments in form, in ideas, and in emotion. Any number of writers of the last fifty years can be read as bringing together two of these strains in contemporary fiction, but hardly anyone else has managed all three in a way that feels to the reader not simply sincere but unflinchingly honest. And it’s these three factors together, I would argue, that have something to do with the degree of connection that readers have felt with Wallace’s writing: not only is that writing serious enough to make the reader work non-trivially in its apprehension, and not only does the writing cause the reader to think seriously about the world in which she lives, but it also helps the reader, on some too often devalued level, to understand herself within that world.

Inconspicuous Consumption Key to Romance Novels

2010-12-09T12:20:00.000-05:00

I love this. Romance e-books are flying off the virtual shelves at an unprecedented level.

Dominique Raccah, the publisher and chief executive of Sourcebooks, an independent publisher in Naperville, Ill., said her romance e-book sales had grown exponentially this year, outpacing any other category. In the first quarter 8 percent of total romance sales at Sourcebooks were from e-book sales. By the third quarter that number had gone up to 27 percent. (Major trade publishers say e-books now make up about 9 to 10 percent of overall sales.) “You’re seeing the real development of a market,” Ms. Raccah said.

Why? Some romance readers are embarrassed by the books' covers. But with the advent of dedicated e-readers that do not display book covers--or even let others know what book is being read--bashful romance readers are free to read away, without fear of being noticed by people you know.

Blog-iversary, 2010

2010-12-03T09:16:00.000-05:00

Well, it's that time of year again. It's my blog-iversary.

Since we last celebrated together I've become something of a professional blogger, by which I mean that I get paid money to write on the internet. It's something of a dream come true, because I had been doing this for free. I've been fortunate enough to publish something in the neighborhood of 160 posts for Ifbyphone and PMI since January 2010. And yet this year has managed to be the busiest yet for The Daily Snowman, with more than 100 posts published since my last blog-iversary. As always, I'm surprised and grateful that many thousands of you decided to come visit (or, I suppose, a few or you visited many thousands of times), to read what I have to say. I truly appreciate your support.

My advice to anyone hoping to be paid to write is this: just start writing. My paid gigs are a direct result of this humble blog, even though I never would have predicted the path from a blog about snowmen to multiple paying blogs about phones. Writing begets writing. Just choose a topic and start writing. You never know who'll be reading.

Let's go now to this year's edition of the Snowies. (Any resemblance to any of these Urban Dictionary definitions of the word "snowy" is mostly accidental.)

Snowiest Embedded Videos

and

Snowiest Series

Snowiest Update on a Multi-Year Series

Yet More Evidence That Laugh-Tracks are Bad

Snowiest Recognition of TDS

Snowiest 2666 Posts

Snowiest Weekly Paragraphs

From Pat Conroy's My Losing Season:

As a boy, I had constructed a shell for myself so impenetrable that I have been trying to write my way out of it for over thirty years, and even now I fear I have barely cracked its veneer. It is as rouged and polished and burnished as the specialized glass of telescopes, and it kept me hidden from the appraising eyes of the outside world long into manhood. But most of all it kept me hidden and safe from myself. No outsider I have ever met has struck me with the strangeness I encounter when I try to discover the deepest mysteries of the boy I once was. Several times in my life I have gone crazy, and I could not even begin to tell you why. The sadness collapses me from the inside out, and I have to follow the thing through until it finishes with me. It never happened to me when I was playing basketball because basketball was the only thing that granted me a complete and sublime congruence and oneness with the world. I found a joy, unrecapturable beyond the realm of speech or language, and I lost myself in the pure, dazzling majesty of my sweet, swift game.

And the great Will Leitch on LeBron's decision:

No, tonight, it felt like everyone involved — LeBron, ESPN, Bing, the University of Phoenix, Stuart Scott, the man who once chastised fans for having the audacity to boo, Jim freaking Gray — treated the millions of people watching like stupid, mindless consumers, empty lemmings ready to follow Sport into the abyss. Here, here are the Boys & Girls Club props. Here, here is your search engine. Here, here is your online college, Here, here is your Athletic Hero. Eat. Eat. Consume. You like it. You love it. You'll always come back for more.

They're surely right, of course. But never has it been laid more bare, and never did it feel so empty. It felt like a break, the moment when the tide crested, when we looked at the games, and their players, and ourselves, and wondered: Why in the world are we watching these awful people? It was a question impossible to answer.

Snowiest Posts About Ivy League Schools

Snowiest Video Essays

and

Snowiest Movie Reviews

Snowiest Books/Reading Posts

Snowiest Posts That Don't Fit in Another Category

Lastly, I'd like to wish a happy blog-iversary to my blog-brother, Ariel at Troubled Souls Unite, now in its second incarnation. He's essential reading if you love music or if you would like to understand the ways in which the love of music is expressed in America in 2010.

Happy Repeal Day

2010-12-02T14:59:00.000-05:00

Call it coincidence or call it an expression of the zeitgeist, but sometimes the media output of a single year focuses heavily on a surprising subject. For example, two biographies of Pistol Pete Maravich were released in 2007. And when historians look back on 2011, they will remember it as the year which witnessed the release of two movies focused on superheros with the word Green in their names.

For some reason, people focused on Prohibition in 2010. Dan Okrent's book Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition was named to The New York Times' list of 100 notable books of 2010 and the HBO's Boardwalk Empire proved to be one of the most discussed shows on TV.

Again, I'm not sure what motivated this sudden interest in a thirteen year stretch of history that concluded in 1933, but I'd like to think that the invention of Repeal Day had something to do with it. Repeal Day was started by Jeffrey Morgenthaler, a bar manager and blogger living in Eugene, Oregon. His initial Repeal Day post was published in November of 2006; maybe it just took a few years for the popular culture to catch on.

Repeal Day, of course, commemorates the ratification--on December 5th, 1933--of the 21st Amendment, repealing Prohibition. To learn more about it, visit Morgenthaler's Repeal Day site or, if reading is too hard, watch this video:

So remember, remember, the fifth of December, and celebrate by enjoying your constitutional right to have a drink.

[Newsreel video via @winemakerguy]

What "Come Together" Means to Me

2010-11-30T16:20:00.000-05:00

My friend Ariel recently put together a series of posts on the songs that get people through their teenage years. It's a rather excellent series of posts on what is a rather excellent blog. He did some crowdsourcing, putting out a call for examples of these songs. I responded somewhat lengthily, nominating "Come Together." Ariel didn't have room for elaborations on why these songs meant something to the several hundred people who replied to his call for submissions, but he did include my song. Going with the theory that whatever I write should see the light of day, here's my nomination for "Come Together," from The Beatles' Abbey Road:

I didn't have many strong musical influences during my teen years. This happens, I suppose, when your parents listen exclusively to AM radio in the car and you don't have any older siblings. I clearly remember, though, going with my mom to Livingston Mall and buying a CD called Abbey Road from some music store which is, undoubtedly, no longer in business.

My mom said I would like it. She was right.

I particularly liked "Come Together," possibly for no reason other than its placement as the opening track on the album.

This song--this album; this band--made me feel as if I was a part of this larger thing called music, as if I understood something that just about everyone else in the world knew about, as if I fit in. And isn't that all a teenager really wants?

Thanksgiving at the Movies

2010-11-25T11:30:00.001-05:00

Celebrate Thanksgiving with this ode to food in film, from the master of the video essay, Matt Zoller Seitz.

MZS correctly recognizes that the preparation, presentation, and plating are just as important as the eating.

Happy Thanksgiving.

How We Remember Sports: FreeDarko's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History

2010-11-23T12:10:00.002-05:00

The title of the FreeDarko collective's latest book--The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History--is something of an elaborate joke. The only part of the title that accurately reflects the book's content is that two-word segment about Pro Basketball. If not for the need to market this thing with a keyword friendly title, it very well might have been called The Subjective and Personal Recollection of Pro Basketball Memory.

FreeDarko's first book-length effort--The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac--presented its thesis right at the start, with a six-part manifesto outlining the group's conceptual approach to basketball, elaborating on such concepts as the primacy of the individual and the superficiality of judging basketball players and teams solely by the unforgiving categories of wins and losses. The Undisputed Guide, on the other hand, hides its working thesis on page 210, in the book's afterword.

And I quote:

As historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote, "Certain memories live on; the rest are winnowed out, repressed, or simply discarded by a process of natural selection which the historian, uninvited, disturbs and reverses." In sports, history is winners and losers, statistics and dates; memory, which is where the stories start, is imperfect, stylized, personal.

The chapter introduction pages contain the most basic achievements of history--NBA champion, MVP, along with per game leaders in points, rebounds, and assists--but the meat of the book, as one might expect, is devoted to topics more closely associated with memory. This most often takes the form of re-readings of accepted wisdom, interpreting, for example, Red Auerbach's Celtics not as the embodiment of slow, stodgy, right way basketball that have become the darlings of strong-willed coaches over the last forty years, but, instead, as a fast-breaking, ass-kicking team that was "tough and focused, sure, but a hell of a lot of fun."

The book's strongest sections, though, describe not the result but, rather, the process of memory. Two examples will suffice here. The first is the essay "Cult of Personality," which examines the ways in which shoe commercials redefined or defined basketball stars of the 1990s. Chris Webber's barbershop commercials amplified his essential character. Larry Johnson was viewed as Grandmama, that slam-dunking old lady in Converses, even after he "grew a beard of Abrahamic proportions to signify his conversion to the Nation of Islam, called his Knicks a teams a group of 'rebellious slaves,' and remarked that he and Avery Johnson were from the 'same plantation.'" Dikembe Mutombo overcame the affected Africanization of his Adidas-designed multicolor shoes through the sheer force of his personality. Perhaps most interesting, though, are those players whose personalities are seen entirely through the prism of their sneakers. When Penny Hardaway's personality was found by Nike to be lacking, the marketing folks replaced it with a stronger one. Thus was born Lil' Penny, voiced by none other than Chris Rock. And Dee Brown simply "was his shoe," the Reebok Pumps. This chapter may necessarily oversimplify these complex athletes, but it serves as a forceful reminder that in the public memory, the shoes really do make the man.

Appropriately enough, the book's ultimate chapter, "Arbiters of Amazement," discusses YouTube's democratization of basketball's public memory. No longer does the NBA and its corporate partners hold exclusive control over the dissemination of basketball moments. They're not mentioned by The Undisputed Guide, but Ron Artest's various post-game interviews given during the 2010 postseason are perfect examples of this new democratic spirit. Artest's meandering conversations with Craig Sager and Doris Burke would never have been given a place in the sanitized official history of the league, but they have been viewed many hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube.

This book is really strong. While other recent additions to the basketball enthusiast's library have claimed to tell the story of the NBA from a fan's perspective, I much prefer to align myself with the approach espoused by these fans and with their thoughtful conception of the game I love.

Recommended.

The Suburbs

2010-11-23T00:12:00.000-05:00

This makes me sad that it's no longer summer and that I'm no longer a teenager and that I can't ride a bike and that suburbs are, apparently, now operating under martial law.

The song is not really my style, but the, oh my, the video. Music by Arcade Fire. Video by Spike Jonze.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-11-21T19:09:00.000-05:00

From "Mikan and Modernity," an essay in FreeDarko's The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History:

When [George] Mikan joined the pros as a member of the NBL's Chicago American Gears, the challenges posed by the 6'10" star were undeniable. No longer was an irregularity of space something that could be corrected through a strong governing body. It now arose not from the field of play, but from the differences between the players on it. Mikan led the NBL in scoring for six straight seasons; basketball's best player was also its most unique.

For more on the geometry of sports, see Infinite Jest.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-11-07T09:18:00.000-05:00

David Owen's article "Taking Humor Seriously," a profile of longtime The Simpsons' writer George Meyer, from the March 13, 2000 issue of The New Yorker:

"I just watched everything," he [Meyer] told me, "and always with the same slack expression on my face. I watched so much and from such an early age, in fact, that I didn't understand what TV was for. I say this to people and they think I'm kidding, but I didn't realize that 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' was supposed to be funny I thought you just watched it. The people said things, and they moved around, and you just waited till you saw the kid-you know, you liked to see Richie. My brothers and sisters and I rarely laughed at anything we watched. We watched more to learn what the world was like and how adults interacted, and what a cocktail party was, what a night club was, what you did on a sea cruise -- although I did like shows where the joke would be that somebody got shot or fell out of a window. When you're a kid, you like to see adults getting away with stuff; because you hope to join them one day in anarchy and mayhem."

When You Set a Screen You Have Got to Have A Philosophy

2010-11-05T12:11:00.000-04:00

Hubie Brown, on the art of the down-screen.

[via TrueHoop]

Don Draper, Saying What

2010-11-04T08:03:00.001-04:00

I'm partial to angry what? (around the 17 second mark, for example). But bemused and cocky what? is also great.

[via Skeets]

Is Larry Summers the Key Character in The Social Network?

2010-10-21T00:21:00.000-04:00

In my last post I mentioned in passing that Larry Summers is the only likable character in The Social Network. Let's revisit that idea.

I still think I'm right about the Summers character's likability. But as I was discussing the film with my roommate, I realized that this issue might be more complicated than I initially thought.

Your thoughts on Larry Summers in the film--played by Douglas Urbanski--most likely depend on your thoughts on the Winklevoss twins. Are they spoiled brats who expect the world to conform to their expectations or are they the victims of a serious case of intellectual property theft? This, of course, is the main question of the movie.

I initially read the twins as the former, but there's reason to reconsider this approach. After all, Zuckerberg did steal their idea, even if he did all the coding from scratch. The courts agree, to the tune of a $65 million settlement. (I'm talking here only about the universe of the film; I have no idea what happened in real life.) They're honorable gentlemen--or, at least, one of them is--who believe in the ideals of a Harvard code, initially refraining from suing Zuckerberg. They've previously succeeded in business, sending a programmer off to work for Google. They're athletic. They're attractive, no small thing for audiences who love identifying with good looking characters.

So why am I introducing the film's overarching theme through Larry Summers? Because the twins' quick interaction with the Harvard president may be the crucial scene to determining their character. Summers dismisses the Winklevosses and their claim pretty conclusively. If the scene were played differently, it might have added additional support to the idea that their legitimate claims are being ignored by the very people entrusted to safeguard their success. But, as shot, this short scene lends credence to the opposite approach.

Let's start with Summers. As Harvard president, he starts off in a position of authority. This appeal to stature is only strengthened when he mentions that he understands the financial considerations of the case because, after all, he had served as Treasury Secretary of the US. But beyond that, Summers is quick and confident and funny, a likable combination. Compare this to the Winklevosses, who repeatedly lose their cool throughout the meeting. Not as much room for sympathy with them. It only gets worse as the viewer learns that the twins relied upon their father's connections to secure this meeting. Score one for the privileged brats theory. Their petulance and immaturity are again highlighted as one of the brothers breaks the knob off a historic door.

This scene, short as it was, sealed my interpretation of the Winklevoss twins. If it were shot just a bit differently, my entire approach to the movie would have been different. It might not be true, then, that your understanding of the Winklevosses guides your take on Summers: your analysis of Summers just might determine your reading of the Winklevoss twins and, I believe, the film as a whole.

Facebook, Privacy, and the Bettering of Society

2010-10-18T13:47:00.000-04:00

All everyone's been talking about is The Social Network, the so-called Facebook movie. And with good reason: it's a damn good film, even if it took some time on the way home from the theater to come up with even one likable character. (We eventually settled on Larry Summers, and, maybe, Erica and Rashida Jones' character.) I'll have some more thoughts on the film, I hope, later this week, but I found it interesting that so many publications used the occasion of the film's release to talk about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. As opposed to the usual formula of the movie following a book--even as The Social Network is based on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires--here we have an outpouring of the written word following a film.

The best of these, at least of the ones I've read, is Jose Antonio Vargas' profile of Zuckerberg in the September 20th edition of The New Yorker. There's the usual history and background, but where Vargas really excels is in discussing issues familiar to any of Facebook's users, a number somewhere around half a billion worldwide.

Here's Vargas on Facebook and privacy, one of the recurring issues of our new digital lives:

Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, added, “This is a philosophical battle. Zuckerberg thinks the world would be a better place—and more honest, you’ll hear that word over and over again—if people were more open and transparent. My feeling is, it’s not worth the cost for a lot of individuals.”

Zuckerberg and I talked about this the first time I signed up for Facebook, in September, 2006. Users are asked to check a box to indicate whether they’re interested in men or in women. I told Zuckerberg that it took me a few hours to decide which box to check. If I said on Facebook that I’m a man interested in men, all my Facebook friends, including relatives, co-workers, sources—some of whom might not approve of homosexuality—would see it.

“So what did you end up doing?” Zuckerberg asked.

“I put men.”

“That’s interesting. No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out,” he said. “We didn’t create that—society was generally ready for that.” He went on, “I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.”

I've never understood Zuckerberg's claim that openness is good. I always pictured this as the posturing of someone whose billion-dollar company requires the redefinition of online privacy in such a way that maximizes profits. But, now, I'm not so sure. I still don't necessarily want my grandmother to see all the pictures I'm tagged in, but it might actually be a good thing--both for individuals and our society at large--if, for example, people felt more comfortable being honest about their sexuality. Who knows, maybe Facebook is doing some good after all.

Hakeem Teaches Dwight Howard How to Play in the Post

2010-10-13T11:56:00.000-04:00

I could watch Hakeem teach post moves all day.

Grover is on a Cow

2010-10-11T12:46:00.001-04:00

Who's Excited for Basketball?

2010-10-05T12:49:00.000-04:00

Amare looks happy.

Vote for my Boss

2010-09-29T09:52:00.000-04:00

Hi there, Snowman enthusiasts.

Take a minute, if you can, and vote for my boss in this video competition hosted by Crain's Chicago Business. He's the one labeled The Sky's The Limit, by Irv Shapiro--it's about a third of the way down the page.

There's no registration or log-in required.

Thank you.

Video Essay of the Week

2010-09-26T23:30:00.000-04:00

Jim Emerson on the shared physical memory of Mad Men, also featuring the gaze. (Spoilers through season 4, episode 9.)

Beautiful Girls (and Mad Men): Ghosts of the 37th Floor from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

His comments here are also worth reading.

The Pale King Cover

2010-09-15T12:20:00.001-04:00

Two things to note about the cover of DFW's latest (last?) book, The Pale King.

In publishing, it's kinda a big deal to have the author's name in bigger print than the book's title. DFW's been at this for a while.
The cover is designed by DFW's widow, Karen Green.

The book, set largely in an IRS tax-processing center, will be released on April 15, 2011. Seven months.

[via The Howling Fantods!, naturally]

Paragraph of the Week

2010-09-12T10:56:00.000-04:00

From David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement Speech, two years to the day of his suicide:

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-09-06T13:24:00.000-04:00

From Ian Frazier's "On the Prison Highway," from the August 30, 2010 edition of The New Yorker:

Beneath a surface layer of unbelief or Orthodox Christianity, Russia is an animist country. Ordinary physical objects are alive in Russia far more than they are in America, and, however Russia's religious or political currents flow, this native animism remains strong. Trees, streets, utensils, groves, machines--each has its own spirit and its own personality, like the cabin belonging to the witch Baba Yaga that could get up on its chicken legs and run around. A Russian telephone isn't just a phone, it's a being; once, at my friend Alex Melamid's mother's apartment when I was having trouble dialling her phone, she showed me how, explaining, "He likes to be dialled slowly." In Russia, alarm clocks don't ring; they burst into rooster-crowing.

[snip]

In Russia the windshield wiper on your car isn't called a mechanical name--it's a dvornik, a word whose more common meaning is "custodian." What we call a speed bump in America the Russians call lezhachii politseiskii, which means "lying-down policeman."

Video Essays: The Wire's Opening Credits and Man Men's Visual Style

2010-09-05T18:37:00.001-04:00

Looking back, the thing I liked most about Phillips' description of Pele from two posts ago is that it felt very much like a video essay, just with the commentary separated from the video, in this case taking the form of the paragraph preceding the video. Video essays are one of my favorite things about the internet: the mixing of mediums allows for smart people to demonstrate arguments and theories with the very evidence needed to best convince the reader of the point being made. Phillips did exactly that and this is why I was struck by the beauty of what he accomplished. I only recognized what he did as a video essay in retrospect.

These essays are perhaps the best form of commentary because it requires the writer to show his work. Video essays are particularly well suited to visual mediums, and there are loads of great ones illuminating films. But the low technological barrier of entry has allowed for some wonderful pieces on serious TV dramas. Here are two examples of what I mean, the first on the visual language of the first two seasons of Mad Men and the second on the opening credits of The Wire's first season.

RETRO: The Camera & 'Mad Men'
Uploaded by Jefferson_Robbins. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

And:

Pele's Brilliance and the Art of Description

2010-09-02T22:45:00.000-04:00

Here's something surprising: Brian Phillips, of the great Run of Play, composed a fantastic post analyzing Pele through the prism of DFW's famous "Roger Federer as Religious Experience" article. That isn't the surprising part. Wallace's piece is ripe for analysis and extrapolation. No, the surprising thing is that, as good as Phillips' application and critique of DFW's is, it pale in comparison to this brilliant description of how Pele does work:

There are moments in Pelé’s games when he dribbles straight into a crowd of three or four defenders. He seems to have done that often, though in the videos now it’s sometimes hard to say who he’s playing against or what year it is or even what the score is or how much time is on the clock. He’ll dribble into a crowd of three or four defenders, which is suicide for a footballer, even in Brazil in the 1960s.

[snip]

It’s almost impossible to keep the fine control you need to take a decent shot when all the defender needs to do is wallop the ball away from you. Pelé dribbles into a crowd of players who have put themselves between him and the goal and whose whole purpose is to get the ball away from him, to keep him from scoring, which again is infinitely easier than the task facing the attacking player, and often in these situations, instead of trying something dazzling or virtuosic, Pelé will just stop. He’ll come to a sudden halt, with his foot lightly resting on top of the ball, and a ripple of confusion and wrong-footedness will go through the crowd of defenders as it tries to react and not fall over. Pelé will do one of those dancing shivering whole-body fakes he excelled at, dropping his shoulder, say, as if he’s about to lunge to the left, but almost simultaneously hinting right with his hips, and rolling the ball just slightly in a teasing way under his toes. Half the defenders start to guess one way and the other half start to guess the other way, but they recover, they’re professionals paying attention, and then just at the precise moment when it looks like a stalemate Pelé knocks the ball through the semi-opening created by their split-second almost-guess and tears through after it, so that one of them falls over and one of them whips around in the wrong direction, and then he’s one-on-one with the goalkeeper and it’s easy to flip the ball up into the corner of the net, in that afterthought way that characterized a lot of Pelé’s strikes. He leaps up in the air to celebrate, that famous happy hop, and the surprising thing about the way he jumps is always how much he seems to belong on the ground; there’s something physically dense about him, something that looks like it wants to sink, so that you sometimes have the impression that the game is keeping him afloat the way the ocean keeps up a battleship. So he comes down, and you laugh, because you have just seen an intelligence perform the remarkable task of solving the complete problem represented by the presence and position of the defenders and the need to control the ball without the use of hands, and you have seen a body so perfectly balanced and controlled that it could act transparently as the agent of this solution even where the solution itself required timing, strength, speed, and awareness far surpassing what most athletes possess. You have seen a thousand different soccer players face this position, and Pelé probably faced it a thousand times, but even if you were reluctant going in, the effect of the Pelé Moment is that for as long as it lasts you are prepared to swear that no one who ever got into this situation got out of it quite like Pelé.

It's a long quote, but I love how Phillips here gives context and meaning to the variety of Pele's actions, a variety that represents one particular skill-set and form of physical genius. Phillips' video compilation illustrates his points:

I think I'm finally starting to understand what makes Pele Pele.

If I Should Fall Behind

2010-08-31T18:17:00.000-04:00

I heard Nils Lofgren sing this song, acoustically, on Adam Carolla's podcast. It's quite lovely.

Lorin Stein on Publishing

2010-08-25T22:59:00.001-04:00

Even as I contemplate my exit from it, publishing holds a special place in my heart. It most likely always will.

Lorin Stein has been blogging at The Atlantic on the topic of publishing. As one would expect, it's excellent. After discussing the the death of book reviews in local papers, Stein says this:

I left book publishing to edit The Paris Review because I think the situation can be dramatically improved. Not in the high-stakes game of bestsellers and Time covers, but down here on the ground, where reputations and markets are built and readers make up their own minds. I want there to be a magazine where fiction and poetry come first, where there's no hype, and where the aim is to reach the 100,000 people who, a few years ago, had never heard of Roberto Bolano—but whose lives have been slightly changed by his fiction.

Stein writes often at The Paris Review's blog, by the way. They do good things there, they do.

Yet More on Zippered Baseball Uniforms

2010-08-24T18:50:00.000-04:00

Let's revisit baseball uniforms that close using a zipper, that topic that interests no one except for me.

I probably should have checked this site a while ago, but Paul Lukas' Uni Watch blog centered a 2008 post on the auction of a somewhat rare St. Louis Cardinals jersey, a somewhat rare jersey that happens to feature a zipper.

Lukas consults with Brian Finch, manager of the Cardinals Hall of Fame, who reveals that 1955 was the last season for zippered uniform shirts. What happened after that year? Did zippers suddenly go out of style? Did interlocking metal teeth pose a safety hazard for diving ballplayers?

Still not sure about the answers to any of these questions, but at least we have a time frame to work with here. The mystery is slowly unraveling.

The Limits of Pop Culture

2010-08-23T21:35:00.000-04:00

This is not one of those stuffy posts, questioning the value of popular entertainment in artistic terms. That's a worthy line of inquiry, but it's not for now. I have in mind a way more basic question: will anyone even remember the popular culture which today seems ubiquitous and permanent?

Here's my starting point, a quick anecdote shared by Jim Emerson in June of this year:

Over Memorial Day weekend I attended a high school graduation in Albuquerque. One of the graduating senior boys gave a speech in which he used car parts as a metaphor for the components of one's personality or identity. It was a clever piece he'd co-written with a friend, delivered with wry humor. Afterwards, the head of the school -- a man I'd estimate was in his 60s -- took the stage and thanked the student, quipping: "Baby, you can drive my car anytime."

Thud. Thunderous silence mixed with scattered, bewildered titters.

The next night at a graduation party, the kid who'd given the speech was standing around with a few friends and the uncomfortable subject came up.

"What was that?" he said. "'Baby, you can drive my car?!?'"
"It was creepy," said one of the girls.
I piped in: "It was creepy -- because it was totally inappropriate and made no sense. Unless he was attempting to seduce you. He was just trying to make a Beatles reference for some reason."
"Oh!" exclaimed a couple of students.
"I didn't even think of that," said the boy. "But still, it was creepy."

This is The Beatles we're talking about. I honestly don't think it's possible for anything today--in our fractured culture--to be as popular as The Beatles were in 1965, the year in which "Drive My Car" was released in the UK. And now, a scant 45 years later, burgeoning adults don't recognize some of the most recognizable lyrics of our most recent century.

You'd think the documentarian nature of the internet would help keep these fleeting bits of culture alive, and, to a certain extent, this is true. I had no idea who these John and Marsha people were that Peggy and Joey kept prattling on about in the premiere episode of Mad Men's fourth season. But, thanks to the web, I was quickly able to find out. It seems to me that this general procedure is how memory will work from now on. Someone will encounter an obscure reference, and she'll proceed to look it up. Even a site like Retro Junk works largely in this way. But what happens when no one's left to make the reference in the first place? I don't encounter many references these days to the outstanding comedy routines of the 1870s, for example. (Though, if I had to guess, I'd wager that there were some wickedly funny Civil War jokes to be had.)

Esquire's short review of Jonathan Franzen's upcoming Freedom was long on praise for the cojones the book's author displays in writing a big book, a book that attempts--according to the Esquire reviewer, who knows a surprising amount about Franzen's unspoken intentions--to join the canon of great literature. (To highlight this point, the header image features Freedom alongside works by Twain, Faulkner, DeLillo, Melville, and Fitzgerald.) The canon of American literature is notoriously fickle. If nothing else, I learned that in my last college literature class, on Melville and Ellison. I'm not sure what, exactly, Franzen will earn with acceptance to the above mentioned group, but if long-lasting notoriety is what he's shooting for, a big, serious novel seems to be the way to do it. Pop culture, no matter how popular, doesn't seem to last very long at all.

Steve Earle, In Concert

2010-08-18T12:03:00.000-04:00

Here is a partial but representative list of things I like because of The Wire: Honey Nut Cheerios, Tom Waits, Baltimore, Jameson, Idris Elba, nail guns, Gus Triandos, and, maybe most of all, Steve Earle.

I was first introduced to Earle as Bubbles' sponsor and was surprised to see him pop up on that episode of 30 Rock in which Jack holds the musical benefit for his father's kidney. Intrigued, I looked into this fellow from The Wire, and realized that he first became known for his music. That episode aired on May 14, 2009. I borrowed some music from Ariel, found a concert on NPR, went nuts on the Amazon MP3 page, and have been listening to Earle ever since. And on Thursday, August 5th, I saw Steve Earle in concert.

It was my first time seeing a concert on purpose. And, you know what, I kinda liked it. It definitely helped that I knew roughly three-quarters of the songs he played. I liked that there were seats to sit upon. (I'm not much of a dancer. The expectation of standing and dancing make me nervous; this would most likely dampen my enjoyment of the experience.) I liked the friendly strangers that sat next to me, one of whom asked me if I take drugs. (He responded with a terse "Good for you" when I informed him that I do not, in fact, take drugs. I did soon after, however, order another Jameson.) I liked that Earle opened with his cover of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole," tying together another one of those things I like because of The Wire.

And, mostly, I liked the music. It put me in a reflective mood, reminiscing on the two years--nearly to the day--since my stint at Publishing Camp officially ended, most of which time (since that fateful episode of 30 Rock) has been spent with Steve Earle as my life's soundtrack.

I have some definite thoughts on these last twenty-four months, as I transitioned from student to employee, from a person enrolled in a set course of action to someone who needs to decide how I want to spend my time and live my life, from someone who hadn't really faced adversity to one who is slowly realizing that success--however you might want to define it--is not automatic.

But exposition of those thoughts will have to wait for a different time. For now, Copperhead Road:

More Evidence of Zippered Baseball Unis

2010-08-09T20:44:00.001-04:00

Apparently Warren Spahn and the Boston Braves weren't the only ones who secured their uniform tops with the interlocking metal teeth better known as zippers. Here's the cover of Sports Illustrated last week:

Stan the Man zipped up his shirt. Why wouldn't these teams use buttons? Why did this stop? The mystery grows.

(Great article by Joe Posnanski about Musial, by the way.)

Paragraph of the Week

2010-08-08T22:42:00.001-04:00

From Pat Conroy's My Losing Season:

As a boy, I had constructed a shell for myself so impenetrable that I have been trying to write my way out of it for over thirty years, and even now I fear I have barely cracked its veneer. It is as rouged and polished and burnished as the specialized glass of telescopes, and it kept me hidden from the appraising eyes of the outside world long into manhood. But most of all it kept me hidden and safe from myself. No outsider I have ever met has struck me with the strangeness I encounter when I try to discover the deepest mysteries of the boy I once was. Several times in my life I have gone crazy, and I could not even begin to tell you why. The sadness collapses me from the inside out, and I have to follow the thing through until it finishes with me. It never happened to me when I was playing basketball because basketball was the only thing that granted me a complete and sublime congruence and oneness with the world. I found a joy, unrecapturable beyond the realm of speech or language, and I lost myself in the pure, dazzling majesty of my sweet, swift game.

I had a hard time settling on this particular paragraph because the 42 pages I've read from this book offered several candidates. The fourteen pages of prologue with which this book opens may be the best I've ever read.

How Chris Kaman Celebrates July 4

2010-07-27T22:16:00.000-04:00

Chris Kaman is a professional basketball player, currently employed by the LA Clippers. He makes a lot of money, somewhere around $12 million per year. He's incredibly goofy. And he also really likes fireworks, or, at least, I hope he does, because he dropped $10,000 on fireworks for his personal July 4th party, and it'd be a shame if he spent that much money on something he didn't like. Video evidence below, via Ball Don't Lie:

I'd like to think that I would celebrate July 4 in the exact same way if I had made $12 million this year.

Two Quick Announcements

2010-07-27T22:09:00.000-04:00

As the title of this post suggests, here are two quick announcements:

Announcement the first: I've changed the layout of this blog. It's somewhat sharper and cleaner than the old one. I hope you like it.

Announcement the second: If you've been reading me over at PMI, you may have realized that things have slowed down there. There's good reason for this: things have slowed down over there. We're moving to a once-a-week publishing schedule, with the possibility that even this will be suspended sometime soon. I'm thrilled with the time I spent there, getting to dig in to a field of interest and publishing something every working day of the week. I might write down some longer thoughts here about writing everyday, but, in short, I recommend it. The good news is that I'll be able to hang out more consistently at The Daily Snowman. I'm going to take a few more days away from writing, my compy, and the internet, but then expect more regular posting here. Sorry for the slow July.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-07-18T22:52:00.000-04:00

Chad Harbach, as part of a round-table discussion on sports and writing, convened by The Morning News:

And yet! I go back to D.F.W.’s essay about Michael Joyce: “The radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art—something few of us get to be.” I guess I care about sports because I consider athletes artists, and admire their art, and also because (this is largely what Wallace’s essay is about) they’re the artists that our society most nurtures and encourages—as a group, you could say that we’re so-so at producing poets or novelists or painters, but tremendous at producing athletes. Which means not only that our athletes perform at levels that are extremely fun to watch, but also that they play out our personal struggles on the biggest possible stage.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-07-11T18:41:00.001-04:00

The great Will Leitch on LeBron's decision:

No, tonight, it felt like everyone involved — LeBron, ESPN, Bing, the University of Phoenix, Stuart Scott, the man who once chastised fans for having the audacity to boo, Jim freaking Gray — treated the millions of people watching like stupid, mindless consumers, empty lemmings ready to follow Sport into the abyss. Here, here are the Boys & Girls Club props. Here, here is your search engine. Here, here is your online college, Here, here is your Athletic Hero. Eat. Eat. Consume. You like it. You love it. You'll always come back for more.

They're surely right, of course. But never has it been laid more bare, and never did it feel so empty. It felt like a break, the moment when the tide crested, when we looked at the games, and their players, and ourselves, and wondered: Why in the world are we watching these awful people? It was a question impossible to answer.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-07-05T12:42:00.000-04:00

From Frank Kelleter's "1776: A Dialectics of Radical Enlightenment," published in A New Literary History of America:

To found a country and constitute a "people" on the basis of natural rights--rather than to commit an existing country or an existing people to such principles--is an improbable thing to do. It marks that country for utopian overreach or constructive despair. It produces forms of self-obsession that often lead one to forget that there is a world outside one's own country. It produces perennial disputes about the meaning of one's communal existence in the world. To the extent that the United States was founded by force of documents, texts, and clashing forms of rhetoric, the United States is bound to be a nation of competing readers and competing readings. And to the extent that even the most self-evident propositions are invariably confronted with local meanings and interests, the United States has always been a nation divided in trying to become one nation. There can be, then, no such thing as a nonpartisan American literature--political, historiographical, or otherwise.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-06-27T12:22:00.000-04:00

From Wyatt Mason's article on David Mitchell, "David Mitchell, the Experimentalist," in the June 27, 2010 edition of The New York Times Magazine:

When writing is great, Mitchell told me of the books he loved as a reader, “your mind is nowhere else but in this world that started off in the mind of another human being. There are two miracles at work here. One, that someone thought of that world and people in the first place. And the second, that there’s this means of transmitting it. Just little ink marks on squashed wood fiber. Bloody amazing.”

America's Soccer Moment

2010-06-23T18:02:00.000-04:00

First:

Then:

Reader's Despair Syndrome

2010-06-22T23:57:00.000-04:00

Hello, my name is Avi, and I'm a readaholic.

I've always been something of an obsessive reader. I read my first Dave Barry column on January 1, 2000, as the comedy writer presented his summary of the millennium. I proceeded, throughout the course of my high school career, to read every single archived column available on any of the dozens of Dave Barry fan-sites I found. I think I was using AOL search, so I may have missed a few columns, but I did manage to uncover a few hundred pieces.

I repeated this general approach after reading Bill Simmons for the first time.

I still remember that fateful day--I was a senior in college--when I first discovered Google Reader. This is awesome, I thought. Google will deliver updates from any website I want? Awesome. What started off as four or five subscriptions soon ballooned to a dozen. I unsubscribed during those summers when computer access was limited, but resubscribed as soon as I returned to civilization. I currently sit at 36 subscriptions, and that's after pruning three in the last week. I don't read everything written on each of these sites. But I read everything from two dozen of them and I skim the rest. This, as I understand it, is a mild case.

At least according to Leon Neyfakh's article "Feed Me, I'm Hungry," published in The New York Observer:

Legions of jittery, media-conscious New Yorkers are eating themselves alive signing up for feeds they never end up reading in hopes of becoming better people—more knowledgeable, more fun to talk to, more in control of their Internet consumption. They subscribe to dozens, sometimes hundreds of news sources, each of them added to the list with the best of intentions, motivated by the knowledge that, if they really wanted to—that is, if they had it in them to be disciplined and vigilantly curious—they could know everything there is to know. And so these poor balls of anxiety walk around with a constant awareness of all the hundreds of unread news stories, essays, reviews, and blog posts waiting for them on computers—all the marvels they're missing on Boing Boing and Kottke, all the Marginal Revolution posts, all the oil spill updates from The New York Times' U.S. news feed.

Call it Reader's Despair Syndrome, a condition that is afflicting New York's young and old with equal viciousness, but which tends to produce the most dramatic symptoms in people in their 20s and 30s, who retain hope that they will one day become more productive and virtuous in their Internet reading habits.

I've been thinking about these issues for a while, but it's always nice to both know that I'm not alone and to have these nebulous concepts articulated clearly. I'm not sure that this form of reading is good. Forget about whether RSS reading is healthy. I'm more concerned about what this does to me as a reader. Do I want to feel obligated to read the blogs that I love? Can I keep up with my reading without it feeling like an assignment in need of completion?

Now, some of these subscriptions are for my blogging gig, so I don't really see a way to do without them. But I'm really curious about how I should treat my recently added subscriptions to The Paris Review Daily and Cardboard Gods. Would I enjoy these more if I visited these blogs only when I was in the mood to read them? I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions.

Are you a readaholic? How has RSS feeds changed the way you read?

Warren Spahn's Zipup Jersey

2010-06-21T18:22:00.001-04:00

Warren Spahn was a superb pitcher. The all-time leader in pitching victories by a lefthander, Spahn's greatness holds up even under a more statistically inclined investigation. He never struck out a ton of batters, averaging only 4.4 SO/9 over the course of his career. But this unfortunate tendency to allow batters to make contact with his pitches didn't keep Spahn from compiling ten seasons in which he tallied at least 5 WAR, with a peak of 9.4 WAR in 1953. So yeah, obvious Hall of Famer.

The most surprising thing about Spahn, however, might just be his uniform. Take a look. There're no buttons on his shirt. The thing zips up.

This is crazy to me. I ran across a photo of Spahn in this zipup jersey over the weekend and I'm completely baffled by it.

I can just about picture Eddie Matthews repeatedly unzipping Spahn's shirt in the dugout. Baseball players love pranks.

Was this a standard practice in the early 1950s? Did the entire Boston Braves team wear these uniforms or did Spahn have some sort of aversion to buttons? Anyone have any more information on these shirts?

June 17, 1994: Subtle Choices Are Choices Nonetheless

2010-06-20T17:52:00.000-04:00

ESPN's presentation of Brett Morgen's documentary June 17, 1994--part of the sports network's 30 for 30 series--opens with the director addressing the audience, saying:

June 17, 1994 is not your typical documentary. There are no talking head interviews, there's no narration, there's simply my editor, myself, and a bunch of footage. Over the last ten years what I've been trying to do is create non-fiction films that are what I call experiential. They're movies that take place in the past but are presented in the present tense. The reason we chose June 17, 1994 is just about every emotion that one relates to sports took place on that day.

I'm not sure whose idea it was to have Morgen describe his directing style before the start of the film, but that person should be commended. Leaving aside the fact that this introductory remark may provide evidence that there is, in fact, at least one talking head interview included in the film, Morgen's opening explanation is a necessary one. It's the first documentary I've seen that eschews reflective interviews and, even if the audience would be able to follow the action without this documentary staple, it takes something of a mental shift to realize that what we're watching is not a meditation on that June date through the lens of sixteen years of reflection: we're watching the on-the-spot reactions of those who witnessed these events unfold in real time. Morgen's introduction might not be the most elegant way to prepare the audience for this change, but I'll take what I can get from ESPN.

The film follows a single day of events in the sports world. The New York Rangers victory parade down the streets of Manhattan. The opening day of the Chicago-hosted World Cup. Arnold Palmer playing his final round of golf at the US Open. Game 5 of the NBA finals, featuring the Knicks and Rockets. A full slate of baseball games. And, of course, OJ's car chase.

The most interesting part of the film is some really great behind-the-scenes footage of Bob Costas, hosting NBC's coverage of the NBA finals. Costas, in these clips, discusses with his production staff how to handle the uncomfortable need to broadcast what was considered a rather important basketball game during what became one of the biggest news stories of the century. The viewer sees Costas desperately trying to determine how best to introduce the game even while OJ sits in the back of a speeding car with a gun to his head. This, in a nutshell, is the major theme of the movie: it's an exploration of how context and juxtaposition create meaning and how people respond to these juxtapositions. While Costas puts on a professional and appropriate face, Morgen throws everything together, forcing the viewer to assimilate six events at once. Trust me when I tell you that each event informs the others, as everything always does. What's fascinating here is that no one--except maybe those working the nation's newsrooms--could possibly have followed the day's events with a level of attention matched by Morgen's mashed-up day. June 17, 1994 as experienced by an average American bears only a slight resemblance to June 17, 1994 as experienced by the film's audience.

And this brings us back to Morgen's opening claim. Just because Morgen claims that this is a thoroughly experiential film, throwing the viewer back in time to 1994, doesn't mean that we have to believe him. As in all films, what the audience sees on-screen is highly curated. The very editing itself is nothing if not a subtle form of reflection, offering moments of commentary through juxtapositions that are anything but neutral. Jumping from OJ's 1985 NFL Hall of Fame induction speech in which he thanks Nicole for some of the best years of his life to an image of a bloody garment at the Simpson residence in 1994 says something. Bringing together footage of a high-speed car chase and a clip of OJ running through an airport on Hertz's dime says something. Apposing the Rangers Stanley Cup victory parade with the throngs who lined the California freeways to gawk at and cheer for OJ's infamous white Bronco says something. Of course, films are supposed to say things. That's the point. And no, this documentary does not faithfully represent how anyone actually experienced that warm June day, but, again, this is the point of film: to selectively tell a story, bringing together diverse elements while omitting needless ones. Morgen does that in spades.

Recommended.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-06-20T08:54:00.000-04:00

Lorin Stein, writing on the excellent The Paris Review Daily blog:

The best thing that ever happened to me as a would-be writer was reading Infinite Jest. I was also twenty-four and spent my days sitting in front of an empty screen, full of a sense of duty and despair. That book cured me. It said all the things I'd have wanted my novel to say—things I'd never have dreamt up on my own in a million years. Keep reading and you will find the book that lets you off the hook. The world doesn't need your fiction. The question is whether you need it, and over time that question will answer itself without interference from you.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-06-13T10:25:00.000-04:00

A selection of Roger Birnbaum's interview with The New Yorker's editor-in-chief, David Remnick, published in The Morning News:

RB: How much is the New Yorker a barometer, a thermometer, litmus test, measuring stick of cultural developments in the United States? Does the ongoing success of the New Yorker say anything about literacy, book-buying, things like that?

DR: Well, if that were the case than it would defy all [the] dark imaginings of all the prognosticators, because our circulation seems to go up. I have to tell you—one of the good parts about traveling or getting out of the house and the well-worn groove between my apartment and the office, and meeting people at this event or that event, is the number of people who come up and, in a non-routine sort of way, almost with an urgency, tell me how important the magazine is to them. Not me, not any single writer, even the enterprise by itself and its constancy. Not because it’s unfailing or because it’s perfect—that’s too ridiculous to hope for—but because of its ambition. I don’t think we are all alone, by the way. There are a number of magazines I really admire and respect that are quite different from ours. But I remember, one week after getting this job, in the almost absurd way I got it, I had to go to San Francisco, and I was at dinner and some guy came up to me. He had been in the Midwest and lived in San Francisco and he came up to the table where we were having dinner and grabbed my arm in a way that was slightly alarming and his message to me was, “Don’t fuck this up!”

RB: (laughs)

DR: “This magazine has meant something to me since I was 14 or 15 years old.” This guy had to be 50 if he was a day, and so his attachment to it was really important to him. And that happens all the time in one way or another.

Have the NBA Finals Truly Begun?

2010-06-09T23:38:00.000-04:00

These NBA Playoffs have disappointed me. Sure, there've been moments of greatness. Artest's follow-up. Artest's interview. Los Suns. Westbrook introducing himself to the world. Nash's battered face. But, overall, a lack of competitiveness marked the first three rounds of this tournament. The losing teams just didn't compete, most prominently exemplified by LeBron and his Cavs surrendering to Boston. The Playoffs are meant to avoid the type of mismatches we normally see in a random February contest featuring Utah and New Jersey. They're fun because they offer the highest level of competition, pitting only the really good teams against one another. And we just didn't get that in the first three rounds. The four losing teams in the Conference Semifinals combined for a total of two wins. The average margin of victory for the Orlando Magic in its second round series was 25 points. Neither the games nor the series were all that close.

The NBA Finals--or, at least, the initial three games of them--have suffered from a different problem. It's not so much that the losers have failed to compete as it is that the winners have failed to play their best. Let's take last night's Game 3 as an example. LA managed a pretty good 109 points per 100 possessions, but did it seem as if the team played well? Bad Kobe showed up, shooting 10-29 overall, including 1-7 from three. And it wasn't as if Kobe had good shots rim out. He was taking difficult, difficult shots, many of them out of the flow of the offense. Pau Gasol, one of the premier big men in the NBA, only attempted eleven shots. Seriously, who played well for the Lakers? Fisher and Odom. And Luke Walton? Is good performances from those three really enough to win an NBA Finals game? The same is true for Boston in its Game 2 victory. Ray Allen and Rajon Rondo had historically great games, but no one else really excelled, certainly not Pierce and Garnett.

This series so far seems preliminary. LA looks like it'll pull things off because how often will Ray Allen make eight three-balls in one game? But maybe Boston will win it because there's no way that Allen will fail to make a field goal again. Garnett followed up two awful games with a great one. Kobe and Gasol had each provided their least in Game 3--and LA still won. What will happen if both teams play well in the same game? I have no idea. But here's hoping we get to find out.

There is No Away

2010-06-06T17:08:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across an interesting public art project, located just down the block from my apartment. It's called The Landscape of No Away: A Community Eco-Art Project, with the subtitle "You cannot throw anything away. There is no away," created by Keesje Fischer and Patricia Eakins. The arresting display consists of fake plastic flowers hanging on a fence near the 190th Street A Train station, fake plastic flowers constructed from recycled beverage bottles and other such plastics which, as the artists state, are the least biodegradable materials. Take a look:

I especially like this part of the artists' statement, even if it uses too many dashes:

When a flower, a leaf, or a vine, has been created from objects ordinarily thrown in the trash--a plastic juice or soda bottle, a grocery bag, the plastic shells that encase many objects we buy in a store--the mystery of transformation that is central to art is glossed with playful irony--trash that mimics nature--yet it contains within it the seeds of hope: the least biodegradable materials, like plastic bottles, that persist in the eco-system and smother it, have the potential for change into art that honors the natural world.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-06-06T12:29:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Franzen, in the June 6, 2010 New York Times Book Review:

There are any number of reasons you shouldn’t read “The Man Who Loved Children” this summer. It’s a novel, for one thing; and haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about?

Alain de Botton on Distraction

2010-06-04T08:46:00.000-04:00

See, I told you unitasking and paying attention and knowledge diets are the new hotnesses. Here's Alain de Botton:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

[snip]

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.

The crazy part is that the three posts I've published on this topic in the last ten days are all based on articles that I've come across in my normal reading. I've done nothing to search out this theme. It's just there.

Winning the Stanley Cup is Beyond Words

2010-06-03T20:41:00.000-04:00

I don't even like hockey, but this is pretty freakin' cool.

Unitasking is the New Hotness

2010-06-02T17:47:00.000-04:00

I don't like stunt journalism. It was interesting for about a minute, and now it's not anymore. I'm talking about those books which detail the author's attempt to do something for, let's say, a year. It could be following Oprah's advice. Living biblically. Living completely rationally. Following George Washington's 110 rules for life. Going undercover as a movie star. The last four of those, in fact, were all attempted by A.J. Jacobs, a writer for Esquire who also happens to have a new book out, titled The Guinea Pig Diaries.

In general, I'm not sure how possible it is to write without having that very process of writing significantly affect the experiences and thoughts being written about. This, I think, is one of the very most important functions of writing. But stunt journalism is different. Instead of clarifying past thoughts and memories after the fact, this type of writing predetermines the actions themselves as--or even before--they happen.

All that is by way of introduction to this piece by Mr. Jacobs, in which he attempts to unitask for a month. I'm not particularly impressed by the article, but, hey, if you're into this type of writing, go for it. Jacobs, if for no other reason than his impressive prolificacy, is the high priest of stunt journalism. I'm writing about it now because once A.J. Jacobs tries to do something for a month, that's a pretty good indication that the activity is one that people are thinking about. And so, get ready to hear a whole lot of simplifying our lives in the next few years. Unitasking is the new hotness.

Artest's Meandering Interview

2010-05-28T08:40:00.000-04:00

I'm honestly not sure which moment of last night's 2010 Western Conference Final was more exciting: Richardson's bank three on the run, Artest's game-winning layup, or Craig Sager's attempt to talk to Artest after the game. Here's video evidence of the last one of those:

Definitely my favorite part of the interview is when Artest attempts to justify an ill-advised three-pointer taken late in the fourth quarter, with the Lakers up three, and 21 on the shot clock:

"I hit shots before."

Paragraph of the Week

2010-05-26T00:13:00.000-04:00

Here's a bonus paragraph on a Tuesday night, just because. Kelly Dwyer on Game 4 of the 2010 Eastern Conference Finals:

Once again, aggression was the key, and I haven't the foggiest as to why the Magic couldn't come through with this sort of effort, this sort of interest level, on Saturday night. All it takes is a good screen and [Jameer] Nelson rounding the corner with any sort of purpose, and you can put the defense — any defense — on its heels.

No matter how great the Boston attack is on that end, this game is well over 100 years old, and nobody has found an answer for having to briefly guard a 5-on-4 attack (after the screen and roll registers one defender useless) with a team's best shooter and passer and driver in control of the ball. It's why teams still run this thing. The stuff works.

I'm still, it would seem, in a pick and roll mood.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-05-23T11:20:00.000-04:00

From Julia Ioffe's article "Roulette Russian," in the the May 17, 2010 edition of The New Yorker, about Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy:

The best way to talk to Ternovskiy is through some kind of digital intermediary. Shy and evasive in person, he fills with a wry swagger when he is just a stream of text. "They have no business no money blablablabla," he typed to me one afternoon, feigning phlegmatic unconcern with the financial woes of an advertiser he'd been negotiating with--his only one. Like much of his generation, Ternovskiy has an online persona far more developed than his real one.

This is your brain on Internet

2010-05-23T01:02:00.001-04:00

Here's how I normally read things on the internet: several tabs, usually between four and eight, worth of Firefox are open, two of which--Gmail and Twitter--provide automatic updates when I receive an email, chat, or tweet. Music or a podcast is usually playing, controlled both via my MacBook's F7-F9 buttons and a series of virtual buttons located on the bottom of my Firefox window via an add-on called FoxyTunes. (If my iTunes is not active, this most likely means I'm sitting in front of a TV or watching Hulu or Netflix or whatever on my additional monitor.) I do most of my reading within Google Reader, where I can see the other dozens of unread posts and feeds waiting for me. In short, I'm rarely focused on reading one thing at any given time. And, of course, the content of the reading itself is different--hyperlinks mean that nothing is self-contained.

I'm not sure this a good thing.

Wired has just published an excerpt from Nicolas Carr's The Shallows, in which the author examines the effect of exactly this type of multitasking on the human brain. After detailing the requisite MRI scanning differences between regular internet users and infrequent internet users--suggesting that technology usage changes, in real and measurable ways, the very wiring of human brains--Carr says this:

Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics--evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats--that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension.

[snip]

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There's the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There's also the fact that numerous studies--including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases--show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online.

And most interesting of all:

When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the use of a new medium, we end up with a different brain, says Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of the field of neuroplasticity. That means that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our brain cells even when we're not at a computer. We're exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply.

We're not looking for quality content so much as constant content. (From this perspective, it sorta makes sense why people don't want to pay for content on the internet.) I'm not sure how helpful it is to ask whether new realities of this type are good or bad, but shouldn't we try to pay attention to things? In addition to keeping these reading and comprehension muscles in shape for situations in which we really need them, I'd like to think, as someone whose writing is probably never read through any medium other than the internet, that people are doing more than just skimming.

Now, I'm not planning on changing the majority of my internet reading habits because a large portion of the reading I do is meant to be skimming. I skim/read probably more than one-hundred posts and articles per day for my blogging gigs, where I'm mostly just searching and sifting for good stuff to write about. But I am going to try to make an effort to pay attention to the internet writers who have earned my attention through their consistent excellence: the Joe Posnanskis, the Josh Wilkers, the Rob Walkers, the Ariels. Both because they deserve it and because I want to be present in the things that I do. Eat while you're eating, and all that.

(This is maybe the main benefit of printed books at this stage of history--the reading experience itself is different because the medium is more focused. Does that mean that only content of a high quality--content that deserves to be read, not skimmed--should be printed? Possibly. It's definitely something for traditional media companies to consider.)

But yeah, let's try to pay attention to what we're reading. Some of it, at least, is worthy of our attention.

Writing and Thinking, Picking and Rolling

2010-05-17T00:44:00.001-04:00

This post is probably ill-advised. It's getting quite late here on the eastern coast of the United States, and I do have work in the morning. But sometimes, man, you just gotta write. I've made a deal with myself--I'm going to forgo any and all proofreading so, you know, watch out for that.

I've been in a moderately introspective mood over the last few weeks, mostly because of David Lipsky newly published book Although of course you end up becoming yourself.... The book is basically a transcript of five days of interviews Lipsky conducted with DFW while he (DFW) toured to promote Infinite Jest. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, because I like reading DFW and this book is ~300 pages of DFW talking. Perhaps the most recurring of the various topics of conversation help between interviewer and interviewee consists of Wallace thinking about he's dealing with success of his giant novel. Does he write because he likes writing? Or because he likes the attention and accolades? And if it's the attention and the accolades, how does that affect his writing?

I'll let you read AOCYEBY to see how Wallace answers these questions, but the book has made me think about this type of question, especially as I've begun writing way more often than really I've ever previously written, writing which is being published for a publication with a higher-profile than the publications I normally write for (meaning: this one). I'm going to be honest here: I don't entirely know the answer. I really like writing, but I'm not sure why, precisely. Let's pretend, for a moment, that writing can ever be done without an intended audience held in the mind of the author, even if the intended audience turns out to be the author himself. Would I still write? I did publish two posts here on this blog before I told anyone that this thing existed. They're bad and they're weird, both because I was just trying to learn how this Blogger service worked and because I wasn't writing for anyone. And while I truly believe that maybe the main benefit of writing is that it forces the writer to think more clearly and in a more organized manner about the topic at hand, the point still seems to be that someone else should read what I write. It's a really tough question.

Here's another: if you've been reading this blog since December, you might remember a post I've published in two consecutive years now, in which I list the various cities I've visited, the media I've read/watched, and the events I've attended. I'll admit that I've asked myself at times whether, let's say, I'm reading a book for myself or for the list. (Usually this happens about 75% of the way through a book I'm not enjoying.) I also wonder how the publication of such a list affects my choice of what to read in a given year.

I don't have answers to these questions. It's really hard to know why I do things, to know what I really like. I'm about as certain as I can be, though, that I really like playing basketball. And it's nights like tonight that help crystallize why. In this case, I participated in the pick and roll just about as well as I ever have. The pick and roll is a somewhat technical term for a nearly indefensible strategy in all levels of basketball. It is the primary offense tactic in professional basketball, but the principles in play are remarkably consistent across all skill levels. Now that I think about it, tactic is probably a more descriptive word than strategy here. Despite its simplicity, I find that I'm having a hard time explaining the pick and roll using words, and the various diagrams available on the internet don't seem particularly helpful. But, luckily, I've spent a decent chunk of my night watching picks and rolls on YouTube, and here is a good crash course in how this tactic works:

I played the Amare role tonight in the pickup game held twice a week in a synagogue basement, if only Amare couldn't jump, wasn't agile, and couldn't finish around the rim (my hands are moderately soft). It was just a real pleasure to run this offense with someone of talent, knowing that no matter what the defense decided to do, we'd have a good chance to score for all the reasons on display in the above video. It's something of a spiritual connection, knowing that if I spin left here, the other guy will find a way to get me the ball in a good position to score, being able to anticipate what your teammate will do. I can't even imagine how Nash-Amare or Stockton-Malone feel. I think this connection has a whole lot to do with what DFW described in the first footnote of his "Federer as Religious Experience" piece, in which he delineates the benefits and downsides of having a body. But now it's really late, and you should read that article in its entirety anyway.

I'm not sure about a lot of things. But I am sure about the pick and roll.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-05-16T11:28:00.000-04:00

The great Joe Posnanski on the iPad:

Now, we have become conditioned to technology, many of us, and so the list might not impress you. You can do most, maybe even all, these things on the iPhone or on your mobile device. Certainly on your computer. Most of the iPad reviews I read talk a lot about what the iPad does not do — play Flash, have a camera, run multiple apps at once and so on. All true.

But I’m not a technology writer. I’m just a guy who grew up in the 1970s. And I like to look at it another way — we’re living in the Jetsons. I can WATCH ANY BASEBALL GAME on this little folder-sized television that I carry around with me? And read books on it (and it’s a much better reading experience than the computer — night and day better). And listen to music on it? And watch movies? And send letters to people that reaches them instantly? And get letters back from the in return? And do my work on it? And shop on it? And play games on it? And so on and so on and so on and every single day it gets better because someone invents some new app that pushes its limits.

[snip]

I’m not saying you want an iPad or need one (or any of the upcoming tablets) — I don’t get commission. I’m just saying, what’s the big deal? It’s a computer and television and radio and newspaper and book and magazine and game console and Internet the size of a piece of paper and the width of a Mitch Albom book. It’s freaking amazing, that’s the big deal.

I want one.

LeBron's Changing Narrative

2010-05-11T23:55:00.000-04:00

Full disclosure: I did not watch a second of tonight's NBA playoff contest in which the Boston Celtics defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers by a final margin of 120-88. I had some writing to do, we don't have cable in my apartment (apparently we're one of the few remaining holdouts in this country), and I really didn't feel like putting shoes back on to go outside to find a cable-enabled TV. But just because I didn't see any part of this game doesn't mean I can't write about it. That's what blogs are for.

I find that lately I've been equally interested in the narrative of sports as I am in the suspense and the action. And the narrative aspect of this particular game comes across plenty clear from the box score:

LeBron James: 42 minutes, 3-14 FG, 0-4 3FG, 9-12 FT, 15 Points, -22 +/-. As mentioned before, his team lost by 32 points in a fairly crucial playoff game.

Now, this series isn't over. Cleveland might very well win these next two games before proceeding to stomp their way to a championship. LeBron has fallen short in the playoffs before. And his team will probably fall short again. After all, everyone besides for Jordan has lost. Yet this loss feels different. This isn't part of the chosen-one narrative. This shouldn't be part of the story. In the past, a LeBron loss was due, narratively, to his poor teammates. And while there's still no second-banana who compares to a Pippen or a Pau, the question is whether this situation will improve. The supporting cast in Cleveland isn't getting any better. The Knicks, even with LeBron and a max-contract friend, will be missing at least three key rotation parts. What does this guy need to do to win a championship?

I find it interesting that NBA Off-Season's brainworks chalks up tonight's loss more to a lack of motivation than to a lack of talent or skill:

Do you think there’s any part of LeBron that’s rolling over? Do you think there’s any part of LeBron that’s saying, “I don’t want a fight.” Fighting and winning might mean Cleveland gets knocked off by the Magic (again), and maybe that makes Bron’s life more difficult?

Because, again, failure due to lack of skill just isn't part of the narrative for the most talented basketball player in the world. If the Cavs go on to lose this series, when LeBron wins a title--and I'm still just about certain that he will--we'll look at that victory as the one which removed the monkey from his back. Have we reached the point where these losses no longer fit in the emerging talent learns his lessons by going again the veteran team storyline? How has it come to this?

2666's The Part About the Crimes and Literary Realism

2010-05-05T19:27:00.001-04:00

I haven't posted much about it recently, but I just last week completed Roberto Bolano's 2666, participating in the group read hosted by bolanobolano.com. I've avoided writing much about the book since January mostly because, after reading the superb recaps and analyses on that site, I felt like I didn't have much to add. Additionally, to be honest, I found the group read scheduling a little disorienting. It's been a little while since my college days concluded and I really haven't read on someone else's schedule since then. I don't know if I could have successfully completed 2666 (and I'm not sure that I even would have embarked upon this journey) without the support and scheduling of the group, but the read felt choppy at times. If I finished a section on a Wednesday, I would usually wait until Monday to begin the next week's portion. This type of scheduling may be better suited for a repeat reading. Something to think about.

But, now that I've completed the book, I'd like to think for a moment on the effect it had on me, the reader. I'm thinking specifically of The Part About the Crimes, the most famous, longest section, clocking in at nearly 300 pages. This part is a weaving narrative of many minor and major characters, but one of the recurring themes is a spate of crimes committed in the Mexican town of Santa Teresa throughout the mid-'90s. The crimes in question are very specific: young women are being raped and murdered. Around 200 of them. And they're described in graphic detail. Here's a representative paragraph:

In the middle of November, Andrea Pasheco Martinez, thirteen, was kidnapped on her way out of Vocational School 16. Although the street was far from deserted, there were no witnesses, except for two if Andrea's classmates who saw her head toward a black car, probably a Peregrino or a Spirit, where a person in sunglasses was waiting for her. There may have been other people in the car, but Andrea's classmates didn't get a look at them, partly because the car windows were tinted. That afternoon Andrea didn't come home and her parents filed a police report a few hours later, after they had called some of her friends. The city police and the judicial police took charge of the case. When she was found, two days later, her body showed unmistakable signs of strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. She had been anally and vaginally raped. There was tumefaction of the wrists, as if they had been bound. Both ankles presented lacerations, by which it was deduced that her feet had also been tied.

First, notice the writing style here. It bears the unmistakable mark of a police report, with the straightforward summary of violence. But more important than the content of this one paragraph is the cumulative effect of reading dozens of such reports. Even though other sections of the novel describe more quantitative deaths, the quality of the descriptions isn't nearly as graphic. The horrific murders of The Part About Archimboldi doesn't register in the same way as the murders of the women in Santa Teresa.

This is a tough, tough section to read. And it's intentionally written this way. James Wood speaks often about the necessary balance of realism and readability in fiction. The Part About the Crimes strained the limits of what I could read. But to achieve the realism needed for this section, Bolano had to push some boundaries here. Because, after all, he's describing the brutal real-life murders of Ciudad Juarez. This is supposed to hurt. It's the only way the author can get across the numbing repetition of these violent crimes. And, you know what, this section wouldn't have had the same effect if this was written any other way.

Seinfeld Recut Becomes George

2010-04-30T19:08:00.000-04:00

This type of thing has been making the rounds on the internet lately, so let's take a closer look. I'm talking, of course, about re-editing movies or TV series to display trailer-length genre-change. So take, for example, The Shining as a romantic comedy:

Or, the hot-off-the-presses Seinfeld recut as a sappy drama:

Mashups and reinterpretations are nothing new. They're been done just about to death in everything from music to literature. And besides for the differing skill levels on display--Girl Talk, for instance, is way better than just about anyone else doing music mashups--I think the interesting aspect of this phenomenon is no longer the concept but rather the effect. By this I mean, nearly two million people have watched the romantic comedy version of The Shining in the past 3.5 years. How many people have seen the original The Shining in that time frame? Is it greater or fewer than the number of people who've seen the re-edit? I only saw The Shining for the first time last winter (on the big screen, at a midnight showing, which was very cool) only about twelve years after first learning the basic storyline on The Simpsons. I guess I'm mostly curious about how culture--popular, in particular--spreads. These types of remixes require a basic level of knowledge. But I wonder, if the fracturing of culture is really happening in the way that some claim, if this collective memory and knowledge will allow for mashups.

Where Publishing Is Going

2010-04-28T17:16:00.000-04:00

As someone who hopes the publishing industry survives long enough for me to carve out a career in it, I'm reading Mike Shatzkin's four-part series on where the industry will end up--with separate entries envisioning that place in both a few years time and in twenty years--with rapt attention. I'm not sure that I have much of substance to add at this point--and it might be wise to reserve statement until parts three and four are posted--but I'm thinking a bunch about the points Shatzkin makes in the following paragraphs:

The change for publishers, though, is far more profound than a simple change in delivery mechanism would suggest. Publishers, indeed all commercial media in our lifetime, have been defined primarily by format. Some do books; some do magazines; some do newspapers. Others called producers do movies or television or radio. The capital and skill set requirements for a format effectively channeled the media company. For the most part, big media was not topic- or subject-specific; it was format-specific.

But when the exchange between publisher and content consumer becomes a file, rather than a book or magazine or movie or TV show, then format becomes irrelevant. A file can hold any of the formats we have historically thought of: text, photographs, diagrams, maps, video, audio. A file can also hold games and productivity software. So the publisher that is limited by the formats of the 20th century will not be competitive in the cloud-and-screen based media exchange of the future.

[snip]

What all of this means, taken together, is that the successful publisher of the year 2030 will own a web community which is both a principal source of content and provides the audience for it. The community will not be content-centric alone; but we aren’t getting into that in more detail right now because sketching out the whole concept for “vortals” is “out of scope” for this exercise.

The publisher who owns “knitting”, or perhaps “knitting sweaters”, will develop and curate the content and control access to the audience just as surely as a major publisher has controlled access to bookstores shelves or a newspaper publisher to newsstand sales in our lifetimes.

If you're wondering why everyone in business these days is obsessed with building communities, well, this is why.

Movie Literacy in Summer 2010

2010-04-27T18:48:00.000-04:00

I've spent some time reading the Screen Rant post which introduces the following video, trying to determine what motivated the hours and hours of editing and splicing that it took to piece this thing together. And I couldn't really find anything beyond: I'm totally stoked for all the movies that're coming out this summer.

But yeah, the video:

To me, the more interesting thing here is that these 150 seconds represent, at least in a small way, the total Hollywood's output for Summer 2010. Familiarity with these films marks a not unimpressive level of movie literacy. I'm personally familiar with 14 of the 24 source movies without having seen a single one of them. And I go out of my way to avoid knowing about movies before I go to see them. If nothing else, this spliced trailer represents how successful movie marketing has become. (Assuming, of course, that the goal of marketing is create awareness for products. But that seems like a question best left to a different blog.)

Paragraph of the Week

2010-04-25T18:59:00.000-04:00

From E.B. White's Here is New York:

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: "This must be be saved, this particular thing, this very tree. If it were to go, all would go--this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.

Fake Infomercial Problems

2010-04-23T08:32:00.000-04:00

Infomercials face a problem: most of the products sold using this advertising genre aren't really helpful or necessary or good. The only way, then, to convince viewers/consumers to purchase these items is to invent a problem that no one actually suffers from, which the product can then cheerfully solve. It's a trope: if every film noir has a femme fatale, then every infomercial has an invented problem.

Even though I don't love the music choice (I would have gone with the Benny Hill theme) this compilation brings together all of my favorite fake infomercial problems. Watch out for the family that can't seem to flip hamburgers, a personal favorite.

It seems YouTube videos are the new weekly paragraphs.

[via Kottke]

Baseball's Fun, Even in the Rain

2010-04-21T17:06:00.000-04:00

Jesus, has it really been just about a month since I brought you something besides a weekly paragraph?

That's gonna change, starting with this wonderful example of what happens when college athletes are confronted with the combination of boredom and a wet baseball field:

FAU and WKU present Rain Delay Theatre @ Yahoo! Video

[via @jeskeets]

Paragraph of the Week

2010-04-12T18:14:00.000-04:00

From Wallace Stegner's The American West as Living Space, via Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild:

It should not be denied...that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-04-04T10:45:00.000-04:00

From The Daily Snowman:

But I want to focus on one lunch. This lunch consisted of fake sloppy joe meat, fake schwarma meat, and a selection of rolls and wraps. The fake meat wasn’t at all offensive; it was even pretty good, although the sloppy joes basically tasted like tomato sauce. But the decision to serve fake meat just called further attention to the fact that we weren’t eating the real thing. Even though the food tasted fine, the meal failed because the food tried to be something it wasn’t.

As Passover comes to a conclusion, I think I've done pretty well in avoiding Passover food that pretends to be something other than itself. You know you're in trouble when Matzah replaces four ingredients in the non-Passover recipe.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-03-28T09:22:00.000-04:00

From Roberto Bolano's 2666:

His relationship with their hostess never once departed from the strict pathways of courtesy and respect. When the filming was over, the ranch owner offered to drive the Epsteins and JT back to Buenos Aires in her Bentley, but JT said he would rather make the return trip with the team. Three days later the Epsteins dropped him off at the airport and JT didn't dare ask them directly about Estela. Nor did he ask anything about the film. In New York he tried in vain to forget her. The first few days were tinged with melancholy and regret and JT thought he would never recover. Anyway: recover why? And yet, with the passage of time, in his heart he understood that he'd gained much more than he'd lost. At least, he said to himself, I've met the woman of my dreams. Other people, most people, glimpse something in films, the shadow of great actresses, the gaze of true love. But I saw her in the flesh, heard her voice, saw her silhouetted against the endless pampa. I talked to her and she talked back.

Helplessness of the Self: James Wood on David Foster Wallace

2010-03-23T00:36:00.002-04:00

It was my true pleasure to spend a portion of this evening listening to James Wood talk about David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, part of The Critic's Voice series at the 92Y. The idea behind this series is to have Wood read a book for the first time before sharing his thoughts with an audience. It's important to keep this basic format in mind, because Wood was very much not presenting a unified reading of Brief Interviews. That wasn't his goal. Instead, it seems that he wanted to think aloud about the book, throwing out his initial reactions as a reader.

This was a wholly worthwhile experience mostly because Wood is an incredibly astute reader. This should come as no surprise to people familiar with his writing, but part of the joy of the talk was to hear how a great reader approaches some really good fiction. And Wood, in fact, started off the talk by reading several passages of exceptional writing, including such gems as "Whereas but your basic smoothie" (p. 31) and "Trim and good and good legs--she'd had a kid but wasn't all blown out and veiny and sagged" (p. 27). Wood referred to these examples of speech--repellent and horrible as they are--as the local pleasures of the book, noting that there is a good American tradition of capturing speech and consciousness.

From there, Wood proceeded to address what he identified as the major theme of the collection: the helplessness of the self, and the trouble of escaping from the self. This is a well-trod trope to those familiar with Wallace's body of work, and Wood did a nice job of demonstrating how this happens throughout a selection of the stories, performing, in one particularly nice segment, a fairly close read of "The Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)," in which the narrator has a recurring nightmare of being blind. Wood called this a typical Wallace modulation; even this 1.5 page story which may at first glance appear to be a straightforward account of a person putting his feet in someone else's shoes becomes overwhelmingly solipsistic. The narrator doesn't devote any thought to how blind people cope with reality. Instead, the story occurs in his head, a solipsistic recounting of the hardships of the day after the night in which he dreamed that he was blind. It's a story that looks like it's all about empathy, but which, in the end, describes the self-centered experience of one person. The same is true, Wood claimed, of "The Depressed Person." Wood read an extended excerpt beginning with the last sentence of p. 67 through most of p. 68. For me, one of the key phrases which demonstrates the essential solipsism of the depressed person occurs at the very end of p. 67: "and here the depressed person waited patiently for an episode of retching in the especially available trusted friend to pass so that she could take the risk of sharing this with her." Remember that this particular trusted friend had been diagnosed with cancer. I especially love the emphasis on taking the risk of sharing. The depressed person truly cannot escape from her own self.

The last major topic Wood covered was the amount of information granted to--or withheld from--the reader. In certain cases, Wood argued, Wallace withholds exactly the information that the reader is most interested in knowing. "Adult World," "Think," and"Signifying Nothing" all hinge on repressing the flow of information to the reader. Wood's main critique, in fact, is that Wallace repeatedly reveals too much, playing his hand too heavily. In Brief Interview #46--the one which mentions Victor Frankl, beginning on p. 116--the hideous man displays an intimacy with the aftereffects of rape that could only come, Wood claimed, from a victim; in Wood's opinion, Wallace should have left it to the reader to figure that out without the explicit explanation at the end of that interview. Maybe the most interesting analysis of the evening came on this exact point regarding Brief Interview #20 (the very last interview in the book). Here too, Wood believes that the hideous man too openly identifies himself with the rapist of the story, most damningly at the very end of that section, when he says: "can you see why there's no way I could let her just go away after this?" (I'll admit that I hadn't thought that this line, along with certain other details--mostly surrounding the vividness of the hideous man's description of the scene occurring on the gravel--implicated the hideous man as the rapist himself, but I am now eager to reread that story.)

From there, Wood took several questions from the audience. I won't touch on all of them, but I do want to mention one question in particular, because it's tied up with Wood's reading of Brief Interview #20. One gentleman asked whether Wood thinks Wallace relies too heavily on "tricks," in particular the footnotes and the brackets, and whether this detracts attention from the empathy and emotional depth of the fiction. Wood responded that in certain ways, it feels like Wallace is performing, and that he would prefer to have seen Wallace perform less. On the other hand, Wood argued, Wallace can often be too much of a realist. This is a point Wood made in How Fiction Works, but, he said, even though Wallace has very good reasons--most of which have to do with recreating the experiences described in the story--to extend "The Depressed Person" past 30 pages, it can sometimes become unreadable. (While I thought "The Depressed Person" was readable, I couldn't help but think of the infamous "Wardine" section of Infinite Jest.) One of the nice things about literary conventions is that we recognize that the whole story can't be told and that sometimes it's worth forgoing some realism for a more concise and concentrated reading experience. (I find this point really fascinating in light of this article comparing Infinite Jest and Wikipedia. Is there really a need for limits?) And, on the third hand, Wood said that he wasn't so thrilled by the prospect of more empathy because it sometimes devolved into sentimentality. Zadie Smith is so concerned with upholding the emotional depth of these stories--as outlined in Changing My Mind--that she, Wood said, fails to appreciate the complexity of the collection. Brief Interview #20 is not a straightforward story of a formerly hideous man learning a valuable lesson from the woman on the blanket. Even if you don't go so far as to identify the hideous man as the rapist, Wood said that it's crucial to recognize that the story, as we saw earlier, is complex.

There were a few additional questions asked--several of them were really good--but it's getting late and my notes aren't as solid on those points. This summary is based on the quick notes I was able to take during the proceedings, so if anyone wants to fill in missing details or to correct mistaken information, please shoot me an email or leave them in the comments.

Passion Shines Through

2010-03-22T08:13:00.000-04:00

I love it when people are passionate about the things they do. I'm always reminded of this during March Madness season--the players are passionate, the group of strangers with whom I watched some of the opening round games were passionate, and, of course, Gus Johnson is passionate:

But he's not the only one who gets worked up over sports. Witness ESPN's Tim Kurkjian talking about a 2007 baseball game in which the Texas Rangers scored 30 runs:

On The Phone: Tim Kurkjian

And this is also why I think James Wood (The New Yorker book critic, and the Harvard professor) is a national treasure: the passion he has for fiction comes screaming through the pages. Take this example from his book How Fiction Works, in which he discusses a passage of Henry James's novel, What Masie Knew:

This is tremendously subtle. It is so flexible, so capable of inhabiting different levels of comprehension and irony, so full of poignant identification with young Masie, yet constantly moving in toward Masie and moving away from her, back toward the author.

This sample is only moderately selected. I opened up to a random page and found that waiting for me. Wood's writing is just full of this type of intelligent yet loving analysis.

I'm going tonight to hear Wood speak about DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Some have pointed out that we shouldn't expect to hear a fawning, only positive review of the short story collection. But I think that's part of the appeal. I wouldn't expect Wood to provide anything other than his honest opinion of his reactions to the book.

More thoughts will follow after the event.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-03-21T12:38:00.002-04:00

From Will Leitch's series of baseball previews over at Deadspin, the Chicago White Sox edition:

But I'm more interested in those players who are supposed to be supernatural and then turn out to be, well, normal players. Just three years ago, Alex Gordon was supposed to be George Brett. A superstar phenom out of the University of Nebraska who had grown up a Royals fan, Gordon was the next great savior of a dormant franchise. Three years later, with some injuries and some big league struggles, he's entering his peak needing a big year just to make everyone stop thinking of him as a disappointment. But he's not a disappointment: He's just a regular player. That isn't enough. He's not what we thought he was, what we wanted him to be, even though none of us had any idea in the first place. He was mortal, not magic.

Sam Anderson's Literary Twitter Experiment

2010-03-16T22:56:00.000-04:00

I like to think that Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine, was at least partly inspired by my Paragraph of the Week series:

I’m late to the Twitter party, but a few weeks ago I decided to start an experiment: tweet the best sentence I read every day. (NB: Someone else had already claimed my actual name, so I had to go with my alter ego: ShamBlanderson.) “Best,” in this context, can mean almost anything: funny, beautiful, enlightening, stylistically amazing. My first tweet was a factoid from a New Yorker story about Whole Foods: “The key variable in deciding where to put the new stores is the number of college graduates within a 16-minute drive.” (I love the specificity of sixteen minutes.)

Other examples include: "'In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one.' (adorno)"

I really like that one. It reminds me of what Rob Walker is doing over at Murketing.

In all seriousness, though, Anderson's stated motivation is very similar to what I hoped to accomplish by highlighting a paragraph each week: "The object is to use Twitter as a daily note-taking system: to document, organically, the various text-streams I actually pay attention to — novels, magazines, blogs, whatever." I just think a paragraph is a meatier portion to record.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-03-14T23:00:00.000-04:00

The mission statement of Rob Walker's Things That Look Like Other Things blog, one of my favorite things to read on the internet:

That contrast is embedded in things that look like other things, and its curious appeal suggests something about one of the great conundrums of consumer behavior, or possibly even of human psychology: our attraction to the novel and our seemingly contradictory attraction to the familiar.

Everything is Familiar

2010-03-10T23:16:00.000-05:00

It appears that, as a society, we've run out of things to say. How else to explain the popularity of videos like the following two?

And:

I'm not sure what exactly these say about our familiarity with everything, but it seems pretty significant, whatever it is.

[Movie one via Emily]

The Problems with Penn Station

2010-03-09T20:39:00.000-05:00

I'm not a huge fan of Slate (I think there's a fair deal of truth in contrarian-by-design criticism) and so I don't see everything they publish, but every once in a while one of their pieces either touches on a personal interest or is just so damn good that I hear about about it through those social networking sharing cycles. Here's a perfect example of the latter: Julia Turner's six-part series on signage.

Turner touches on everything from highway road signs, to competing EXIT sign designs to the varying maps and symbols people use to navigate London. But my favorite piece is the one titled "Lost in Penn Station." There's tons of good stuff here, but here's a choice selection:

When I first started interviewing sign designers for this series, I was surprised that they didn't talk much about signs. I'd expected to learn a lot about typeface and color selection. Maybe, if I were lucky, a revolutionary new arrow.

Instead, I learned there's a reason professionals call what they do not "sign-making" but "wayfinding." Their goal is to help users find their way through complicated environments. That requires a lot more than good-looking signs. To create a sign system that works, designers must first understand how people will use a space. When beginning a hospital project, they'll map out all the possible routes a visitor might take. How would a patient with an oncology appointment get to it? How about a visitor to the maternity ward? If they're designing new signage for an existing space, they often quiz the security guards. No one knows better what people find confusing.

[snip]

The problem at Penn Station is not that designers skipped these steps. It's that three sets of designers did them three times. Penn Station is owned by Amtrak, which manages its concourse on the western side of the station. But Amtrak leases the rest of the station out to the two other tenants: New Jersey Transit has the southeast corner, and the LIRR the northeast. (The Metropolitan Transportation Authority oversees both the LIRR and New York City Transit, which manages the two adjacent subway stations; their sign systems are similar to the LIRR's.) The fundamental wayfinding problem at Penn Station lies in the fact that each of these entities manages its own signs, usually without consulting the others. As a result, the station essentially has three different systems of signage.

[snip]

Penn Station is a remarkably challenging environment for wayfinding. But it's a useful place to examine, because it highlights the single most crucial thing a wayfinding designer must do: think about the user and understand how he will perceive a space. When signs are good, and you pay attention to them, you can sense the level of thought that went into them. Someone, somewhere, anticipated the journey you are on, and the information you would need. At Penn Station as a whole, it's no one's job to think about how you'll get where you're going. And you can tell.

I love the idea of asking a security guard about problems visitors run into. This is exactly the type of architectural thinking that I find fascinating. The essential question is: How do people interact with the spaces they inhabit?

Ironing a Shirt

2010-03-08T20:53:00.000-05:00

I'm happy enough to wear an ironed shirt but the act of ironing itself drives me moderately crazy. This happens because I don't really know what I'm doing. When it comes to shirts, I lack all semblance of a strategy and am instead reduced to just spraying steam haphazardly and trying to smooth out noticeable wrinkles. The process is somewhat beneficial to the garments, but any onlooker worth his looking salt will notice that the shirts don't exactly look presentable.

Ironing a shirt seems like one of those basic tasks I should know how to do. Maybe especially because I love this paragraph from Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which appears on the second page of this 600 page novel:

I couldn't read anymore. I decided to iron shirts instead. Which is what I always do when I'm upset. It's an old habit. I divide the job into twelve precise stages, beginning with the collar (outer surface) and ending with the left-hand cuff. The order is always the same, and I count off each stage to myself. Otherwise, it won't come out right.

This guy seems to have a different method than Murakami's narrator, but you would be hard-pressed to argue that it's not effective.

That was strangely mesmerizing. The guy is an absolute virtuoso. I will watch anything so long as the performer or act-er is sufficiently skilled.

[Via Put This On]

Paragraph of the Week

2010-03-07T23:43:00.000-05:00

From Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest:

And all at once I saw why our societies use gift wrap: not for the sake of surprise but rather to cover up the fact that The Gift is based on a lie, as we inevitably discover every time somebody gives us something, yes, and we open it and, after that microsecond when we expect the fulfillment of our deepest desire, disgust and sadness wash over us and we smile as fast as we can and say thank you, the better to bury our chagrin at never once in all our lives receiving something more than what we'd hoped for. And this evanescent joy, forever disappointed, remains incomprehensible to us.

OK GO's Endlessly Fascinating New Video

2010-03-02T21:49:00.000-05:00

So here's the hottest thing on the internet today:

And here's the best thing said about this video today, from Ken Tremendous's Twitter: "I might just keep watching this, over and over, until I die. This may be J.O.I.'s 'The Entertainment.'"

Baseball Prospectus and the Importance of Fanship

2010-03-01T23:26:00.000-05:00

Maybe the best thing about the internet is that it allows people with shared interests to converse. I'll touch on why this makes Twitter so damn cool in a post later this week at PMI, but it's not just Twitter. The homepage of Meetup at this moment features such clubs and groups as the Baby Boomers Social Club, the Raleigh Horse Riders, and The Greater Boston Asian Professionals Meetup Group. Being a fan of something has never been easier and it's never been more important. Here's Matt Bucher, from a paper originally delivered at last year's Footnotes Conference:

This small group of dedicated fans is also a key resource for translators of Wallace’s writing. Members of the list have answered questions and helped with translating challenging passages for Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and German editions of Wallace’s fiction and non-fiction. This is a practice that seems commonplace on the list now, but would be inconceivable in the world of contemporary fiction even forty years ago. For example, were fans of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse consulted on its Russian or Japanese translations? Before the Internet age, this would be almost impossible to do, but it is also unlikely that a translator would know of a group of John Barth fans and trust their understanding of his use of the language. If anything, the translator might discuss a tricky issue or two with a fellow translator or a Barth scholar at a conference. In terms of how Wallace is perceived around the world, this use of the hive-mind cannot be underestimated. It not only attracts an international population to the list, but furthers the understanding of the most idiomatic and idiosyncratic parts of Wallace’s writing.

However, this gets us closer to the question of what kind of people join the list, and it brings up larger issues about communities and intellectual discourse and group psychology. The list includes English professors, writers, musicians, mathematicians, artists, lawyers, bloggers, women who have deep and abiding crushes on Wallace, and every stripe of over-educated young man dying to talk about “important” literature.

I'm still amazed at how The Grammys enabled music fans to become collaborators in a very real way with the musicians they emulate.

And so we come to my second annual trip out to a Baseball Prospectus book reading.

You know how Intel has rock stars unlike the public's rock stars? It's just as true with a Baseball Prospectus reading. These folks are the nerdiest baseball nerds who ever nerded. And that's why they're great.

Aside from learning that Stephen Strasburg is the highest rated pitching prospect in history--higher than Mark Prior, higher than Kerry Wood, higher than Brien Taylor, higher than anyone--I got to participate in one of the world's great niche language communities. At one point, an audience member mentioned that one of the problems with watching a baseball game on TV was that the camera angles don't allow the viewer to see the route an outfielder takes to the ball, missing completely an essential aspect of the defensive game. Judging just from the information available on TV, we have no idea how circuitous a route he may have taken. At this point, one of the panelists agreed and then mentioned the name Terrence Long. Without elaboration. Everyone chuckled. Here's why this is great: Terrence Long is a fairly obscure outfielder who last played in 2006. He most recently accrued 500 at-bats in 2003. He hasn't been a regular in a long while, and he wasn't all that notable even when he was earning a Major League paycheck. But the audience recognized both who, exactly, Terrence Long is and that his defensive reputation is, let's say, less than stellar. We were having a conversation through references, via a shared body of knowledge. And while Baseball Prospectus can still be depressing as hell, it's totally worth it for the language games I got to play.

Paragraph of the Week

2010-02-28T11:24:00.000-05:00

From Roberto Bolano's 2666:

Soon the end of the sacred came to the movies. The big theaters were torn down and up went the hideous boxes called multi-plexes, practical, functional. The cathedrals were filled by the wrecking balls of demolition teams. Then the VCR came along. A TV set isn't the same as a movie screen. Your living room isn't the same as the old endless rows of seats. But look carefully and you'll see it's the closest thing to it. In the first place, because with videos you can watch a movie all by yourself. You close the windows and you turn on the TV. You pop in the video and you sit in a chair. First off: do it alone. No matter how big or how small your house is, it feels bigger with no one else there. Second: be prepared. In other words, rent the movie, buy the drinks you want, the snacks you want, decide what time you're going to sit down in front of the TV. Third: don't answer the phone, ignore the doorbell, be ready to spend an hour and a half or an hour and forty-five minutes in complete and utter solitude. Fourth: have the remote control within reach in case you want to see a scene more than once. And that's it. After that it all depends on the movie and on you. If things work out, and sometimes they don't, you're back in the presence of the sacred. You burrow your head into your own chest and open your eyes and watch, pronounced Charly Cruz.

Hack-a-Shaq and Sport's Rule of Law

2010-02-25T22:28:00.003-05:00

The Olympics always make me question the rules of sports. I watch all these new sports with unfamiliar rules and I'm often struck by the seeming arbitrariness of these laws. But the weirdness might not be limited to foreign sports played on ice: questions about the meaning and motivation of the rules of familiar American sports abound, once we take a step back and look at them objectively.

A friend of mine directed my attention to what turns out to be a damn good Wikipedia article on the Hack-a-Shaq strategy. (He had to read it in lawyer school, in the context of legal loopholes; thanks, Dave.) For the uninitiated:

The Hack-a-Shaq name was originally used during [Shaquille] O'Neal's college playing days, and during his NBA tenure with the Orlando Magic. At that time, however, the term referred simply to opposing teams employing an especially physical style of play in defending against O'Neal. Teams sometimes defended him by bumping, striking or pushing him after he received the ball in order to ensure that he did not score easily with layups or slam dunks. Because of O'Neal's poor free throw shooting, teams did not fear the consequences having personal fouls called against them when using such tactics. However, once [Don] Nelson's off-the-ball fouling strategy became prevalent, the term Hack-a-Shaq was applied to this new tactic, and the original usage was largely forgotten.

The interesting part is the tension between the rulebook and the spirit of the game. The Wikipedia article goes into some detail describing the NBA's attempt to limit this fouling strategy (whether in Wilt Chamberlain's playing days or Shaq's) by awarding two-shots and possession to the team whose player is intentionally fouled in the final two minutes of game action, in order to preserve the sheer watchability of the contest. But should the governing rules of the sport be compromised for considerations of entertainment value?

This is a cool question, not least because fouling itself may be something of a compromise. The concept of free throws seems to be an invented solution to the problem of overaggressive defenders. In short, it's a punishment for cheating, rather than an essential part of the game. Theoretically, if defenders never fouled--if fouling wasn't possible--there'd be no need for free throws. (You can listen to Bill Cosby's take on this development here.) The flaw which the Hack-a-Shaq strategy exploits itself derives from a compromise solution.

Similar questions have been raised about the infield fly rule, most notably by William S. Stevens, who wrote a celebrated article titled “The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule” in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. You can find the article here (PDF link), but here's the relevant section:

The Infield Fly Rule is obviously not a core principle of baseball. Unlike the diamond itself or the concepts of "out" and "safe," the Infield Fly Rule is not necessary to the game. Without the Infield Fly Rule, baseball does not degenerate into bladderball the way the collective bargaining process degenerates into economic warfare when good faith is absent. It is a technical rule, a legislative response to actions that were previously permissible, though contrary to the spirit of the sport.

Where because the men who oversaw the rules of baseball during the 1890's were unwilling to make a more radical change than was necessary to remedy a perceived problem in the game, or because they were unable to perceive the need for a broader change than was actually made, three changes in the substantive rules, stretching over a seven-year period, were required to put the Infield Fly Rule in its present form. In each legislative response to playing field conduct, however, the fundamental motive for action remained the same: "To prevent the defense from making a double play by subterfuge, at a time when the offense is helpless to prevent it, rather than by skill and speed."

[Note: I've left out the footnotes of this excerpt because they aren't strictly relevant to my point and because I'm stupid at HTML.]

Sportswriters often crack wise about the infield fly rule but I always thought that was due to the obscurity of the rule; I failed, until tonight, to understand the legal ramifications.

And--just so we hit all three major American sports--this makes me wonder about the onside kick in football. I'm not sure why it's allowed. Why can the kicking team recover the ball just because it traveled ten yards? Why is this rule limited to free kicks, and not, for example, punts? Is it allowed because of the increase in entertainment value, giving hope to teams teams trailing by multiple scores in the fourth quarter?

Maybe curling isn't so weird, after all.

The Great Rivera

2010-02-24T18:57:00.000-05:00

Baseball's in the air. At least in Florida and Arizona. But even up here in chilly and rainy New York, now is prime time for baseball annuals. I'll have more on Baseball Prospectus 2010 sometime soonish, but, for now, I'd just like to point out how lucky Yankee fans have been since 1995, able to watch the great Mariano Rivera pitch an average of 67 times per annum. From the Baseball Prospectus 2010 non-numbers section on Rivera:

Rivera has had an entry in every edition of this book. Superlatives we have employed: "something special" (1996); "amazing...the most important player in baseball" (1997); "completely unhittable" (2000); "the best closer of his generation" (2002); "otherwordly" (2004); "a one-trick pony [but] the best of all time (2005); "splendid...like Fort Apache: The Lead" (2006); "the-by-acclamation Greatest Closer of All Time" (2008); "the closest thing baseball has to Fred Astaire" (2009). Get the picture?

But maybe the most important thing Baseball Prospectus has said about Rivera comes from the 2009 version. It's not quoted above because it is more a piece of advice than a superlative: "We don't know how many more years of this Rivera has in him, so enjoy it while you can still see him without having to schlep up to Cooperstown."

Bret the Speed Skater

2010-02-22T20:45:00.000-05:00

Hey, cool. I didn't realize that Bret McKenzie moved from New Zealand to Canada and became an Olympic speed skater.

He should have worn his hair helmet.

Knicks Recap

2010-02-21T22:34:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Seth over at Posting and Toasting, I attended last night's Knicks-Thunder game in T-Mobile's luxury suite. Even though the suites at MSG are way up in the rafters (the dual "15" banners for McGuire and Monroe were just about eye level), it's really a nice experience, mostly because of the free food and the private bathroom.

But this game would have been fun to attend even if I was rubbing elbows with the common folk. I haven't seen the Garden this excited for a Knicks game in years and years. And with good reason: despite the extremely high price they paid at last week's trade deadline to clear cap room for two max-contract free agents this summer, the Knicks have a plan for the first time this decade and they're sticking to it.

And it was exciting to see three new faces get serious minutes. Let's consider them one-by-one.

Tracy McGrady
The night, in short, belonged to him. The Knicks reordered their pre-game player introductions to save the shooting guard position (read: McGrady) for last. If this didn't make a clear enough point, the crowd erupted into a sustained "We Want T-Mac" chant during the fourth quarter. Besides for the injuries, the question with McGrady has always been motivation, and quotes like this make me think that he might come to play through April:

“I haven’t felt that good in a while, to really be received that way, to hear those chants,” McGrady said. ”It really gave chills down my spine.”

I don't think McGrady will be with the team past June, but I understand the rationale for the crowd's excitement: Tracy McGrady is the biggest name to play for the Knicks since Ewing.

On the court, McGrady looked a step-slow, a little sluggish, and just a bit sloppy. But it's hard to argue with the results. He ended up with a few favorable foul calls that could have easily been called offensive, banked in a jumper from the top of the key, but managed to slither and scoop his way to 26 points on 10-17 shooting from the field. Some of the sloppiness may be attributed to the fact that there are T-Mac's first meaningful minutes since February 2009. The athleticism from McGrady's younger days was nowhere to be seen, but he's only 30 years of age and seems to be capable of transforming himself into a key member of the crafty-scorer club. Two skills that didn't disappear during the twelve-month layoff are McGrady's passing and court vision, most notably on display during his length-of-the-court fast-break bounce pass to Al Harrington. This, more than anything else, is what we can expect from McGrady.

Eddie House
It feels weird rooting for House after all those years he played for the Celtics, but he's a fun player. A gunner without a conscience (in a good way) who plays off his dead-eye shooting by making clever passes when a defender overreacts to the threat of a shot. Pairing him with Gallinari holds promise as a fun and effective lineup.

Sergio Rodriguez
Rodriguez played 26 minutes last night and limited himself to only two turnovers. This would seem to be the big concern with his play, as he's averaged 3.4 per 36 minutes over the course of his career. He's a dynamic creator and contributor--those six assists could easily have been eight or nine if some players (Al Harrington, in particular) knocked down a few wide open looks facilitated by Sergio. Knicks point guards have been of the solid and nondescript variety for as long as I can remember. From Derek Harper, to Ward, Childs, and Duhon, the Knicks haven't employed a point-man who excelled at getting to basket and distributing in a whole long while. (Don't get me started on Marbury.) Rodriguez can't shoot a lick, but he brings a skill to the team that they've been missing.

In the end, the Knicks lost for three reasons:

The team can't defend the interior at all. Russell Westbrook put up 31-9-10, and he got to the rim whenever he wanted. A quick consultation with ESPN's shot chart reveals that only four of his thirteen field goals were jumpers, and only two of those came from beyond ten feet.
The Knicks were in the penalty for what seemed like every minute of the game action after the half. The Thunder shot 41 free throws, and even though they only made 30, the twelve extra converted freebies kept the Knicks from really building and then maintaing a lead.
Kevin Durant is a cold-blooded killer.

The game was a fun watch and the Knicks played with the sort of urgency that's been sorely missing during the past six weeks. The playoffs are just about an impossibility at this point, but, if last night's contest is any indication, the remaining 28 games should be entertaining. That's all a fan can ask for as we count down to the summer free agency period.

What Are New Yorkers Reading?

2010-02-19T16:57:00.000-05:00

I've spoken once before about how nice it is to be able to judge people by what books they're reading and how e-readers jeopardize that fun. It's not stated explicitly that the growing e-reader market motivates them, but the fine folks at CoverSpy are doing a great job cataloging what New Yorkers are reading on the subway before it's too late. It's a fun little read, especially because I keep searching for a description of me. But so far I haven't seen any mention of 2666; I'm still scheduled to be reading that through the beginning of May.

Yet More Evidence that Laugh Tracks are Bad

2010-02-18T21:59:00.000-05:00

We've spoken a few times about the problems with laugh tracks. There have been some new developments, so I think it's high-time we revisit this issue. Let's begin by witnessing what would have happened if David Simon had decided that creating the greatest American work of art of the '00s wasn't sufficient and had, instead, opted to try to broaden the appeal of The Wire. (There's some profanity in the following clip.)

More interesting, perhaps, is the effect of Gawker TV's video edit of a great scene from Arrested Development. The edits were similar: they added a laugh track. It's amazing how the addition of a laugh track makes this scene decidedly unfunny. The result is not embeddable, so you should definitely click over and check it out.

Shows without laugh tracks are still in the minority today. So let's take a look at what happens when one of those standard sitcoms has it's laugh-crutch taken away. Without further ado, here's CBS' Big Bang Theory with the laugh track stripped away:

So we've learned that laugh tracks:

Ruin good dramas;
make funny shows unfunny;
and, lastly, mask the unfunniness of unfunny shows.

And I think that makes a pretty appropriate 200th post in The Daily Snowman's history.